Information Gathering

It's amazing what you can find out about a person when you can actually communicate with them. We had the chance to do this on Friday with Abigail, sort of.

We had an exchange student over from Hong Kong on Friday afternoon. Deb had a whole list of questions that we wanted to ask our daughter. Up till now our communication has been using a very limited vocabulary, usually one word at a time, accompanied by hand gestures. Abigail understands quite a bit, but asking her something about her past or how she feels something (for example) just isn't in the range of possibilities for us right now.

They started out by looking through a couple picture books that we had from the orphanage in China. Abigail started out fairly quietly but it didn't take long before she warmed up to the situation and began to talk non-stop. It became very difficult for Deb to inject anything into the conversation and Abigail dominated the conversation for the most part. Once in a while, Deb would be able to interrupt to ask a question, and often times the conversation just continued on through the question, with Deb having to interrupt again to ask for an answer.

This went on for an hour and a half. I had set up the video camera ahead of time, so I got the whole conversation recorded. The next day we were back on our own and Abigail was telling us she wanted to listen to some Chinese tape. It took us a while, but we finally figured out she wanted to watch the video that we had taken the day before. So she watched herself for a while. I think she would have watched the whole thing again if we would have let her.

We did manage to get a fair amount of information, despite the difficulty in asking questions. We found out that she was not allowed to go to school for at least two years, and when she did go, it was usually for three hours per day or less. She didn't really know why she did not go to school, but it did answer the question why she seems to be a couple years behind in her math skills.

She did say she likes it here. That was good to hear. She said it was a bit boring at times. I think the 'boredom' may be mostly the difference in environments. She helped care for the younger children quite a bit at the orphanage. Here, there are no younger children, only two older teenagers who are still grappling with the concept of a little sister.

The boredom can't be from the lack of activity. Our household, to a large extent, is still operating in chaos mode, where things are happening faster than we can process them. David bought a car on Tuesday and the boys and a friend of ours trailered it home on Thursday night. So in addition to a new child in the household, we now have a non-functional car sitting in the driveway: David's new project. We had a visitor when Deb and Abigail left for a church function on Saturday, and Abigail was amazed to see four cars in the driveway. She counts rather loudly and announces the result at the top of her voice. "FOUR!" she shouted, as she and Deb got in one of the cars. With our little scorekeeper away with Deb for a while, David and I spent a couple hours trying to get his car started. We were unsuccessful.

In the chaos of the day on Friday, Deb lost her list of questions and so wasn't sure if she had covered them all. Perhaps she will get another chance. Deb and Abigail are meeting the student again on Monday to take a trip to the Siagon Market, a local oriental food store, to shop for food that Abigail might like.

We'll have to see what kind of dinners are served at the Friend household in the next several days...