What I Learned Caring For A Rescued Abused Child In Rural Yunnan: Practical Tips For Caregivers
The thermos hit the concrete floor with a crack that made me jump, hot tea spreading across the entryway of our shelter’s kitchen. It was mid-November, rain leaking through the crack in the window frame, and Xiao Mei had just rounded the corner too fast. Before I could even open my mouth to say it was fine, she’d cringed backward, both arms thrown over her head like she was waiting for a blow. That was two weeks after social workers carried her out of her grandfather’s farm two hours up the mountain, where she’d been locked in a toolshed for most of her seven years.
I’d volunteered at this small shelter for abused and abandoned kids for 18 months before Xiao Mei arrived, and I still got every instinct wrong the first month. The other new volunteer pulled her into a hug the first day, cooing that she was safe now, and Xiao bit her hard enough to break skin on the forearm. I used to jump in and reassure her every time she flinched, saying “I won’t hurt you, I promise” until our part-time social worker pointed out that all that did was remind her that getting hurt is a normal thing to expect.
Our shelter isn’t some fancy facility with padded playrooms and full-time therapists. It’s an old converted village school, with chipped blue paint, bunk beds that squeak when you roll over, and donated rice that always has a few small stones to pick out before cooking. We have seven kids here, most of them in the local primary school down the dirt road, and we try to keep things as normal as possible.
After that first week, I started testing small changes to how I interacted with Xiao Mei, based on what our social worker shared with us. The first thing was I started announcing every move I made before I did it, even the tiny ones. If I was walking past her where she sat on the steps, I’d say “I’m coming past you now, I won’t bump your shoulder.” If I wanted to tuck her hair behind her ear, I’d hold my hand out and say “Can I fix your hair? It’s in your eyes.” I never touch her without asking first, no matter how small the touch. At first she’d just stare at me, but after a month, she started nodding sometimes.
The other big issue was the food hoarding. For the first two months, every cracker, every candy, every half of a steamed bun she got went into a hole in the back of her mattress. When we first found it, there were moldy pieces of bread from weeks before, and I almost emptied it out right then. Instead, I just took out the rotten stuff, sewed the hole back up, and left the rest. Now, every snack time, I put one extra treat on her plate and say “This one’s for later, if you want it.” You don’t have to tell a kid who went years without enough food that they’ll get more tomorrow. You just have to show them, over and over. Last week, she left half a cookie on the kitchen table after snack, and didn’t go back to hide it. That’s a bigger win than any big speech could ever be.
A lot of well-meaning people ask me what they can do to help kids like Xiao Mei, and they expect a big answer. But most of the things that work are small, boring things that you do every day, over and over. If you’re a teacher who has a kid with trauma in your class, or a new caregiver just starting out, the first thing I tell you is to stick to a strict routine. We eat at 7, 12, and 6 every day, bed at 8:30, school drop off at 7:30. I tell Xiao Mei what’s happening tomorrow the night before, what we’re doing after lunch today, so there’s no surprises. When you grow up never knowing when the next bad thing is going to happen, knowing exactly what comes next takes a huge weight off you.
Another thing that’s helped is not pushing her to perform happiness or openness. We get tourists and volunteer groups coming through sometimes, and they always want Xiao Mei to smile for photos or talk to them, and it makes her run and hide under the bed for an hour. We just tell people she’s quiet, and that’s okay. You don’t have to heal a kid’s trauma in a year, or even five. You just have to not make it worse by pressuring them to be okay before they are.
Last week, we walked down to the village together to get soy sauce for dinner. It was a sunny day, the dirt road was dry, and half way there, she reached up and slipped her hand into mine. It was sweaty and small, and she let go after 20 steps when we passed a stray dog, but it happened. Tonight, I checked on her before I went to bed. She had a lollipop sitting on her nightstand, not hidden under her pillow, and she was curled up with that chewed one-eared stuffed rabbit someone sent us from Kunming. I pulled her blanket up over her shoulders, and she mumbled something that sounded like good night. I didn’t ask her to repeat it, I just said good night back and closed the door soft.
We don’t know what her future holds. There’s still a lot of hard days ahead, days where she flinches for no reason, days where she won’t speak at all. But right now, she has a warm bed, enough to eat, and nobody hits her or locks her away. That’s more than she had three months ago, and that’s enough for now.
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