Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Gotcha Day

The 15th is pretty much just a travel day. We had about a 6 hr drive from Corbett to Delhi, then had to fly from Delhi to Calcutta. Once we landed (to VERY high humidity), we had about an hour drive to our hotel.

The 16th was "Gotcha Day". We had an appointment to pick up Keira at 12:30, so we went and did a bit of browsing in the markets close to the hotel in the morning. We grabbed some lunch and headed to the orphanage.

The orphanage has two buildings and we weren't quite sure which one Keira was at, so we went to the 1st address on the list. It was the home for the brand new infants and the special-needs babies. We were able to meet the Ayahs (caregivers) who took care of her when she first arrived at 1 day old and saw where she stayed for her first little while there. We were also able to get some pictures of kids waiting for their families to pick them up and could send new pictures back home to mommies & daddies. The kids were very cute!!! The newborns were tinny-tiny. One of the infants was still in an incubator and another was on an IV. Others were just 1.5 kilos (3 pounds) or about that size. Rod said "I'd take one of these home too." (Me too) It was VERY evident that they were being well taken care of.

We then headed to the other location to pick up Keira. One of the Ayahs rode in the car with us with a little boy whose parents were picking him up after us. In the car, he was all smiley and kept saying "oma" (Mama). He's 2 years old.

We walked up the stairs at the 2nd location and Michelle went first. An Ayah was holding Keira so Michelle saw her as soon as she was high enough up the stairs. She was surprised that she'd get to see her immdiately. We all made it up and immediately started snapping pictures.

Michelle went right up to Keira and Keira was completely fine. She wasn't smiling, but she also didn't cry. Michelle waited a bit before picking her up, but when she did, Keira was just fine. She just looked at her mama and inspected this new person. We then all headed into Mrs Roy's office to do paperwork. Michelle held Keira on her lap and she eventually fell asleep.

After all the paperwork, we headed around the rest of the cribs and took more pictures of babies for other parents. All of them are SO cute. We area where Keira had been staying had 3 big cribs with 3-4 kids per crib. As we watched the kids, it made sense to have them in larger cribs with kids to interact with to help with socialization. Again, they were all very well taken care of.

We got into the car (Keira was still asleep) and started back to the hotel. As we got close, the driver said that a street was closed. It took more than hour to finally get back to the hotel as it turns out that police had closed streets for a political rally. When we got back to the hotel, we saw the hundreds of thousands of people in the street for the rally. Thankfully, Keira slept the whole car ride.

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