A visit to St. Catherine's

As most of you know we adopted PJ (Pranjali) from St. Catherine's close to two years ago. The adoption process was quite interesting and fairly long and deserves a seperate blog post of its own. At that point, we did not really get a chance to see the place where PJ spent the first twenty months of her life. We had decided to go back and spend some more time out there when we visited India the next time.

We went back and visited St. Catherine's on Dec 28th. It was a wonderful experience and I'm so glad that we did it. St. Catherine's is part of PJ's life and she was looking forward to the visit. She knows pretty much all what we know about the place (which is not a whole lot), but she does remember Sr. Helen and all the chocolates she gave PJ. Sr. Helen was on vacation, so we coordinated with the Sr. Superior (Sr. Udaya) for the visit.

We went at 3:30 pm when the kids were waking up from their afternoon nap and ready to start the afternoon session. There were approx 30-35 kids with at least 16 infants including an 8 day old baby. It was quite nice to see a very high staff to kid ratio. There was approx 1 staff for every 2 infants and 1 staff for every 3 toddlers. It was nice to see how they raise the kids and the kids interaction with each other. There were a couple of kids at the place that reminded us of PJ.

Quite a few of the staff remembered PJ and were very happy to see her. We met some of PJ's primary caregivers and made sure we got some photographs and names of them so we can have some more details of the PJ story. PJ was probably a bit overwhelmed at the visit and for the first part was very very quiet and stayed relatively close to Mari and me. There were a couple of kids who were there when PJ was there, so there was a mini reunion. The two kids who were still there were handicapped and hence i suspect they were still there. I did feel a bit sad for them, but they are also getting really good care from a great group of sisters and staff. PJ got a bit more playful as the day progressed but was still quite reserved compared to her normal self. We will visit St. Catherine's a few more times before we leave and hopefully she will get used to it and enjoy the experience and interact with some of the folks who took care of her a lot more. There was a movie screening that night, so we left a bit earlier than expected. All the kids were quite excited to go see a movie. In addition to the kids orphanage, they also operate quite a few other services for abused and hiv children.

We were pleasantly surprised to see one solar street light which they are testing. We'll probably get them to install quite a few more for the rest of the complex. It also seems to be lacking a good play structure for the smaller kids. We'll probably chat with the sisters about both these projects