Stuck in China

Here is the blog of a poor family that is stuck in China and hasn't even been able to get to their new child yet. The Swine Flu has China in a panic mode and it is now affected a lot of US travelers including the ones going over to adopt. This is a very real thing, and I can't possibly imagine being quarantined in China without my husband or children :( Please pray for 3 very special families that just left this morning headed out for China to bring home their children. I will post their blogs tomorrow so you can follow them along on their journey. Let's hope theirs isn't near as "exciting" as this other family!

Here was her post today on another site:

HI everyone!

Thank you for all the good wishes. We're fine. It's sort of a cross between a really lame vacation and Groundhog Day, is all. We're told we'll be out Saturday, and we're getting there. Rob feels fine but sadly yesterday's culture was still positive, so he's in until Friday at least. He was never really sick--he's said that if we were at home, he wouldn't have noticed.

The rest of us should be out of the woods today. Our CDC thinks incubation is 1-4 days, and today's the 4th solid day since they pulled rob from our merry band, and 7 since the plane flight--and we'd hardly catch anything here!!! They are NOT checking in-country flights, so once we're done, we're done. I'll be fearing the knock on the door for a while, though.

I know lots of you are now wondering whether to bring your kids, and I don't have a solid rec. Ours are, against all odds, mostly still having a good time. There's always toast, so even if they weren't adventurous eaters (they're ok), they wouldn't starve. we have a movie for every night, and when the day's at it's hottest (right now!) they're oddly amused by Chinese cartoons, and I can even pretend it's educational. It's the HOSPITAL that frightens me, and the randomness of it all. If we had hit up against a really hard-headed official, I can see our embassy as giving up, say, my mother and 7-year-old son but insisting that I stay with the youngest. And then what if my mom got sick? What if my husband and I had BOTH been sick? Do I think our embassy will allow parents and kids to be separated for 7 days under those circs? No. Do I think there might be some frightening hours while it's getting sorted out? I do. Say, for example, that my mom was sick and alone with my older son. They would take them both downstairs, and rush her into one ambulance and him into another. She might not even realize it was happening--that's pretty much what happened with us and Rob, and we had our kindly Hyatt manager with us, translating. She also doesn't have a cell phone, or the embassy's number. Would it get sorted out? I'm sure it would. Would Sam have some frightening hours? Yes.

Nothing awful is going to happen, barring a tragedy with the flu. The hospital's not great. They don't have kid-sized needles, we're told, and they take all temps under-arm because they don't want to sterilize the thermometers (real glass mercury ones!). The food, as you can see on my blog, sometimes has heads and teeth. But I'm not kidding myself that they couldn't, or wouldn't, send a whole squad of haz-mat suited folks in here, pick up kids, rush us all around and do whatever they think is necessary even while I'm dialing the embassy. If they thought taking Wyatt away and shooting him full of Tamiflu without me would keep H1N1 limited in this country, they'd do it in a heartbeat. It's hard to really believe it until you're in it, but it's true.

None of that happened, of course. And I don't think it will, to us or to you. They don't mean to be unkind or frightening. It's just different. But it COULD.

Good luck!

Lola

http://raisingdevils.com