TheBanyanTree: Return to China - Part 9

[Pat M]

 Children at the ditch running through the orphanage where everything is
washed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u0QW0ALtTI

Nov 29

Last night I awoke at 1:30 am with a bad case of heartburn.  Two hours
later, I woke up again.  This time my intestines were grumbling, growling
and gurgling. Painful spasms told me what was coming next.  For the rest of
the night, I wore a path in the marble floor between my bed and the toilet.

As I lay waiting for the next attack, I wracked my brains as to what had
caused it.  Yesterday, I'd eaten many different things.  Peter and Grandpa
had dropped me off in town and I'd purchased some treats at the supermarket
including some candy-coated peanuts that I'd gorged on.

My new friends, Alex and Jessica the two young women who work here had
brought me gifts of pomegranate and some honey buns which I'd also enjoyed.
I'd held hands with the children and carelessly not washed up before eating
dinner.  But, I suspected, the problem was the salad.  During both lunch and
dinner I'd been called up to the food counter and offered raw bean sprout
salad with soya sauce and thin strips of unidentifiable meat in it.  I knew
I was getting preferential treatment as the children didn't get any salad
but my stomach rather than my sense of fairness had gained the advantage.  It
had been so long since I'd had anything other than rice and cabbage that I'd
taken large servings of the delicious salad, completely forgetting that
eating anything raw was taking a big risk.  When a person is as hungry as I
am for something fresh and flavourful, it's easy to 'forget'.  I noticed
that I chose not to look too closely at the bits of meat in the salad
because I didn't want to know what it was in order that I could eat it. I
have no experience with real hunger as many of the children here do, but it
has been surprising to me how just a couple of weeks of being deprived of a
variety of nutritious, tasty food has affected me. It gives me some inkling
of how hunger could drive a person to eat just about anything.

For most of the day I slept.  I ate no breakfast and could only stomach a
few tablespoons of rice for lunch.  Just the thought of boiled cabbage made
me nauseous.  When I saw Peter, I talked to him about having a cooked potato
for supper.  Although I want to be able to eat the same food as the
children, it is becoming more and more difficult to do so, and now that I'm
sick, it's impossible.

The rice for the orphanage is cooked in a machine that looks like a
refrigerator with many shelves where deep cookie-sheet trays of rice are set
and steamed for 40 minutes.  I don't think it has ever been used to steam
vegetables, but it did a fine job of the potato I'd requested and with a few
grains of salt from the kitchen, I was able to get it down.
I had nothing to give to the children and escaped back to my room and into
my cozy bed as soon as I finished dinner.

*****Pingguo China 2008 photos can be viewed at
http://picasaweb.google.com/Ms.Pat.Martin/Pingguo#