File from Love Without Boundaries

Pictures and reports of Matteo's life before we knew him recently arrived in my e-mail inbox.  His orphanage in Fuyang is supported by Love Without Boundaries (LWB) and his lip repair and foster family were sponsored by the organization.  They run many wonderful programs for children across China.  In addition to sponsoring surgeries and foster families, they provide medical care to children so they can stay with their birth families, they set up schools inside orphanages and provide children with well-balanced meals.  These much-needed programs required a lot of resources, yet Love Without Boundaries still takes the time to catalog all the photos and reports for each child in their programs so that if they are adopted, they can one day pass along all this information to the new parents.

The Love Without Boundaries website has a link under it's Contact page called Request for Child Information.  Once the adoption has been finalized, adoptive parents may submit a request for any information the organization has on their child.  I filled out the online form and hit send, but wasn't sure what I would receive or how long it would take. 

Exactly a week later, we received the gift of a glimpse into Matteo's life before we met him.  Love Without Boundaries had responded to our request with a Dropbox link. I clicked on it to find four electronic folders from the different stages of LWB sponsorship: Matteo's two stays in healing homes, his hospital stay for his lip repair and his time with his foster family.  In each folder, meticulously labeled and organized into sub-folders were monthly reports (thankfully written in English) and pictures.  There were 170 pictures from his Anhui Healing Home stay alone! 

I will be forever grateful for the care Matteo received before he became part of our family.  He needed that surgery and of course he needed loving care, like every child deserves.  What we don't necessarily "need" is the information LWB provided.  As much as the origanization was able to share with  us, it still leaves many pieces of Matteo's early life unknown and questions unanswered since LWB can only provide information about Matteo's life while he was under their care.  Yet I will argue that every person deserves to know his or her history; therefore, I am as thankful to LWB for having the discipline and organization to record all this information for each and every child in their care as I am for the medical needs they fulfill. 

I spent an evening scrolling through all the pictures and enjoyed seeing images of him that I had never seen before.  It was also bittersweet to be playing catch-up through pictures of my son's early childhood, yet again, I'm thankful for everything and I wished there were more.