Magic Hospital

During the past two months I have become involved with an NGO in Beijing called Magic Hospital, which is a program to support sick and/or underprivileged children.  (outdated website www.magichospital.org, new one coming soon) We have many different programs at varying institutions around Beijing, all of them hospitals, orphanages, or schools for migrant children (which are not funded by the government and hence perennially short on supplies and resources).  Some of the programs we sponsor at hospitals are clown visits, art teacher visits, santa visits, an abracadabra program which is basically like Make-A-Wish, and something called 'Inner Olympics' which awards outstanding courage in the face of chronic illness to inpatient kids.  We also have several programs focused on orphanages and migrant schools such as Outdoors Days, a music enrichment program, and english teaching.  

 I have been brought on board as a coordinator for the Storytelling Program, a new program which is really more like Playtime visits for kids in the hospital. It reminds me of when we used to visit the playroom at the vandy children's hospital with APO.  Basically the idea is for groups of volunteers to plan out a 1.5-2 hour visit with storytelling, crafts, songs, puppets, etc to entertain the kids and provide a little distraction from why they're in the hospital. 

I am currently in the midst of negotiations with big children's hospital in Beijing, Er Yan Suo, to try to get our program started there.  I went to a meeting last week with the director of a floor, who ended up being very busy and giving us instead to his head nurse.  She listened to us, was very excited, and then said she had to ask her boss, who said she needed to have a meeting with us and have an official proposal.  We had a meeting with her tonight, and it seemed to go very well…until we got to actually ironing out details of when volunteers could come.  It turns out they really don't think weekends are a good idea - they don't have any staff there in the leadership who can make decisions in case of an emergency…and they have the busiest inpatient load of all week…(does that seem like a bad combination to anyone else?!)…and really only T-R afternoons are good.  Despite the fact that most volunteers are students or working and can only volunteer in the evenings or on the weekend!  It was an interesting cultural experience, as the nurse administrator was reluctant to actually say anything specific, she wouldn't say weekends were impossible but wasn't willing to acknowledge what I was saying about volunteer availability.  It was frustrating at the time, and eventually we ended with a hazy, "I'll talk to other nurses and important people and let you know".  The Chinese lady from Magic Hospital who was at the meeting with me told me that Chinese people are reluctant to make any definite answers for risk of being wrong/having to change it, which just screams at me as ending a meeting without all the important stuff being worked out.  Its hard to get used to, but hopefully all those important people will realize that a volunteer program with no volunteers isn't very useful it will work itself out.  It will be interesting to see what happens!