Next stop – Chengdu

We took a bus from Zigong the same afternoon. We left at 4 p.m. arriving at Chengdu at 7 p.m. Ah, a hotel again after several days of hard travel! We checked in and went to eat in the hotel dining room first. We ate a bowl of rice with pumpkin and shredded potatoes at the Jackson Family Care Center for lunch. We didn’t eat the pork because the Chinese like the fat and I saw them chopping up the meat with mostly fat and only a little of the leaner meat. They also like bones in almost every piece of meat, believing that it adds more flavor and nourishment to the dish. We took showers after dinner (the drain did not stop up from dirt, even though it had been about two days since we got the shower in Kunming at the Super 8 hotel). We got a good night’s rest and woke up about 6 a.m. We met Jackie Fang, our worker from Xi’an at the breakfast buffet and then he and Ron went to the military hospital for a meeting and lunch.

This hospital will most likely agree to a joint-venture to do open heart surgeries for us just like we now do at a military hospital in Xi’an. This will provide us with more patients and more children that we can save. The hospital is well-equipped for heart surgeries and also cleft palate reconstruction. We will pursue the next cleft palate medical mission with this hospital.

While I stayed in the room to work this morning, Ron and Jackie were served lunch by these uniformed officers of the military. Ron was bragging that a 3-star general (a lady) served him today. I think his head was a little too high in the clouds bragging about this but he’ll come back down to earth quickly enough.

The hospital bought us train tickets tonight to go to Xi’an. Our workers were unable to get tickets but the military had no problem getting us soft sleeper beds. It is a 16 hour train ride so I hope it will be a newer and cleaner train than the last one. We will leave tonight about 9 p.m. and arrive in Xi’an at 1 p.m. tomorrow. We will immediately leave to drive about three hours to the next location to look at a possible site for the next orphanage. I will report on our success with that trip in my next segment.