SILENT
TEARS Vacant stares. Emotionless expressions. Handicapped children ignored and malnourished because of their disabilities. Infants left hungry, unwashed, and cold. These are just some of the irrepressible memories Kay Bratt endured after four years of dedicated volunteer work in an orphanage in rural China, an experience she shares in her moving memoir SILENT TEARS: A Journey of Hope in a Chinese Orphanage. In 2003, Kay Bratt set out on a journey that would change her life forever. After relocating her family to rural China to support her husband as he took on a new management position for his American employer, Bratt began working in a local orphanage—an experience she was totally unprepared for. The plight of many Chinese orphans is horrific. In a country where boys are still considered more valuable than girls, where the disabled are treated inhumanely, and where poverty and government restrictions on having more than one child has created a heartbreaking system of infant abandonment, thousands of children are left in the hands of overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded orphanages. SILENT TEARS provides a rare glimpse inside the walls of one such orphanage. Bratt chronicles her fight to slowly bring about important changes; nurturing the children, donating necessary supplies (soap, baby powder, wipes, diapers, clothing), increasing the number of volunteers, raising money for medical procedures, and building trust with the orphanage workers. She traces the emotional hurdles, psychological
trauma, and daily frustrations she faced as she fought against the
Chinese bureaucracy and tried to change the social conditions for
these marginalized children. |
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