What I Learned Caring For A Rescued Abused Child In Rural Yunnan: Practical Tips For Caregivers
The first time I saw Xiao Mi, she was pressed against the back of the storage closet door in our group home, one hand clamped around a crumpled half-pack of dried mango someone had given her in the car from Lincang. It was 7 a.m., I was carrying a bowl of congee with pickled radish, and when I stepped toward her, she flinched so hard her shoulder hit the door frame.
The child protection officer who brought her filled me in on the walk. She was seven, her parents died in a mudslide two years earlier when they were working the tea terraces. She went to live with her paternal uncle, who already had three kids of his own. He didn’t send her to school, made her carry 30-pound tea baskets up the mountain from dawn, hit her with a bamboo stick when she dropped any leaves, locked her outside the house at night when she finished all the work. A tourist hiking the trail heard her crying one rainy night and called the local child protection hotline. That’s how she ended up with us.
For the first 12 days, she didn’t speak a word. She wouldn’t sleep in the little bunk we made her with a pink quilt, she curled up on the floor next to the window. I found crumpled, stale steamed buns under her mattress the first time I changed the sheets, and half a bar of chocolate I gave her for her birthday, melted into the fabric. My first instinct was to pull her into a hug, tell her she was safe now, that no one would hurt her here. But the senior child care coordinator I work with stopped me before I could. She said, don’t do that. She doesn’t know what a hug from an adult means right now. It just feels like another thing that can hurt her.
That’s when I started unlearning all the things I thought I knew about caring for kids who’ve been hurt. I started adjusting small, daily things without fanfare. Instead of hovering near her when she sat on the step peeling wild vegetables we’d foraged, I’d sit on the other end of the porch, sort laundry, and not talk to her unless she looked at me first. I always announced my movements before I moved toward her: “I’m coming over to get the bucket by your feet, okay?” “I’m going to reach up to get the plate off the shelf above you, I won’t touch you.” If I wanted to give her something, I’d set it down on the ground a foot away from her, instead of putting it directly in her hand. I asked her every small choice I could think of, even when she never answered: do you want the pink shirt or the blue shirt today? Do you want congee or noodles for breakfast? Do you want to walk around the block or stay home and draw?
Two weeks in, she was holding a chipped clay cup I let her keep for her water, and she tripped over our dog’s rubber chew toy. I instinctually reached out to catch her, and she flinched so hard she fell backwards off the step. I froze, pulled my hand back immediately, and said, slow and quiet, “I’m just going to pick up the broken cup, okay? I won’t come close.” I picked it up slowly, got a new cup from the kitchen, filled it with cool water, set it on the step three feet away from her, and went back to weeding the jasmine bed out front. Fifteen minutes later, I felt a small tug on the back of my shirt. I turned around, and she was standing there, holding a fresh jasmine bloom she’d picked, holding it out to me.
A lot of people who reach out to us asking to care for kids who’ve been rescued from abuse want to know what the most important thing to get right is. Most expect the answer to be big: love, or a stable home, or therapy. But the thing I tell them is that it’s letting the kid set the pace, and giving them control over all the small things they never got to control before. This isn’t vague advice, it’s specific daily choices. If your kid hides food under their mattress, don’t yell at them for making a mess, don’t take it all away. Just check it once every two weeks to throw out the stale, moldy stuff, and leave the rest be. After three months, Xiao Mi stopped hiding buns under her mattress, because she learned there would always be more food at dinner tomorrow, no matter what. If they flinch when you raise your hand, don’t get offended, don’t launch into an explanation that you’re just reaching for a glass. Just lower your hand, tell them what you’re doing, and move slow. Don’t force hugs, don’t force them to say “I love you” back, don’t push them to talk about what happened to them. I’ve had Xiao Mi for eight months now, and she’s never said a single word about her uncle or those two years up the mountain. That’s fine. She doesn’t have to talk about it to heal.
Last week she started first grade at the local public primary school here in Kunming. She came home with a sticker of a rabbit on her hand, and she told me she got it for counting to 20 correctly. She still flinches when motorcycles backfire loud on the street outside, she still hides crackers in her pillow when it rains, because her uncle locked her out in a storm once. Some days she won’t speak at all, just follows our dog around all day picking jasmine to string into bracelets for him. It’s not the perfect “rescue story” you see in the news, where the kid is happy and healed after a few months of good care.
We’re taking it day by day. This week, she let me hold her hand when we crossed the street to get mung bean ice cream. That’s enough for right now. Rescuing a kid isn’t just the big dramatic moment when you pull them out of a bad situation. It’s a hundred small, boring, unremarkable moments every day, where you let them know they’re safe, on their terms. That’s the work, and that’s what sticks. There’s still a lot that’s uncertain, a lot we don’t know about how things will go for her down the line. But right now, she gets to decide when to talk, when to touch, how much rice she wants for dinner. That’s more than she had before, and that’s a start.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What I Learned Caring For A Rescued Abused Child In Rural Yunnan: Practical Tips For Caregivers