endless love – a love in Hebei

We are standing at the bedside of a mentally handicapped child in Hebei, the former imperial province of Zhili in northern China. I help the petite nurse to clean the room and put aside the varnish soaked by urine and sweat of the night to spread a newly cleaned but worn cloth over the clean wooden boards. Meanwhile, the children are feeding and then bathing. Without ever admitting it or letting on to the other volunteers, I am happy to do the bed cleaning. When feeding, it is often difficult to hold the children’s heads to administer the rice porridge. Sometimes it takes real force and due to epileptic seizures, the food sometimes lands on my T-shirt or even in my face. When bathing, the various physical handicaps become obvious, and I often ask myself whether some of the crippled arms and legs could not be operated on to make walking and grasping possible or at least easier. Therefore, when feeding and bathing, I find it difficult to keep pity at bay, even if it is interrupted again and again by moments of joyful cordiality when the children laugh or nestle tenderly against me. While cleaning, on the other hand, I can indulge my thoughts and sometimes even have a little conversation with the sisters about God and the world and, frankly, admire them. They are not cleaning, bathing, feeding here on a temporary basis with a return ticket to another world in their pockets, but are living their ministry and have entered the religious community for it.Above the bed, as on six other beds in this small and stuffy room, there is a Chinese name on a strip of masking tape: Ye. I ask what it means. The name of these children is the phonetic translation of the last name of a Catholic priest who founded this center for the physically and mentally handicapped years ago. It is the only home here in this area, whose city center alone has 700,000 inhabitants. The next center of this kind for the handicapped is about 200 kilometers away in the direction of Beijing, in the next metropolitan area, the graceful and charming sister next to me told me. In this country in rapid upswing and for years with double-digit economic growth rates, there is no social system as I am used to in Germany. Here, in front of the Don Bosco Center, children who have been abandoned by their parents are simply dumped at the door of the complex at night, or they are found abandoned at the edge of garbage dumps. And since the sisters know nothing about them except their need for help, they give them these self-invented names. On the greasy note above a bed, which I will never forget, the name is written:永远的爱 (yongyuan de ai) and the sister translates with a smile: endless love.