I went to Hong Kong to “change the world…”

I went to Hong Kong to ‘Change the World’ and instead a non-verbal child changed me! 

In my twenties, I was hungry for adventure and to put my zealous evangelical faith to the test. I wanted to see if God really would look after me, whilst on said adventure.

I bought a one-year return ticket to Hong Kong for my 24th birthday. I booked one week in a youth hostel, planned for a friend of a friend to pick me up from the airport and had an interview organised with St Stephen’s one week after my arrival.

The dream was to work with drug addicts. This dream came crashing around my ankles when the organisation didn’t believe God was calling me to their kind of work.

So instead, I went travelling. Three months after arriving in Hong Kong, in June 1997, I began working at Mother’s Choice, an orphanage supporting babies, toddlers with special needs and young women needing support through their pregnancy.

There I met Josh, a three-year-old deaf, autistic boy who had been abandoned and who lay rocking in the playroom to soothe himself. With no language to communicate, he didn’t know how to engage with the world around him. Something in me resonated with his isolation.

Neither of us could possibly have known how our lives were about to change that day, but from that day on, I was never the same again.

Life does that sometimes. There’s no trumpet fanfare or announcement. You simply turn a corner.

Meet a stranger.

Take a call.

Get on a plane.

Or in my case, read a book that changes your life.

That’s what I had done when I was 14 years old. I read Jackie Pullinger’s Chasing the Dragon and that was why I was now in Hong Kong almost ten years later, to meet my hero and put my faith to the test.

Becoming a family

I stayed at Mother’s Choice with Josh for two years, supporting him through a cochlear implant operation. Ours was the first adoption to the UK after the handover, and so it took a further five and a half years for us to finally become a legal family.

Josh remained at Mother’s Choice whilst I completed the adoption paperwork in the UK. This took so long because I was a single parent undertaking teacher training, in order to be able to create a financially secure home to bring him to.

It took many expensive flying visits, heartbreaking goodbyes, an exhausting home-report process and months apart before he was allowed to travel to the UK. He came to the UK when he was seven, but he was nine before he was legally mine.

However, in doing so we made legal history and are now cited in the law books. Our case redefined a home as being who a child is with during the adoption process, rather than the bricks and mortar they stay in.

Who Josh is now

He is now thirty-two.

At the age of seven he had no sign language, didn’t know his own name and couldn’t put 1, 2, 3 in the correct order. He had enormous value to me as the gentle, curious and cheeky chappy he was when he had no language. 

But now he can also communicate all his basic needs in British Sign Language (BSL). He can read and write in English at a basic level. He lives in his own home, cooks and cleans for himself, and is supported 24/7 by a team of four support staff who all use BSL.

He works four days a week in two communities for adults with learning difficulties. He creates beautiful furniture out of wood. He is a potter and weaver and his work was recently selected by Craft Scotland to be included in an exhibition by adults with learning difficulties, for his highly intricate 1,000-strand weaving.

Josh is my hero. I want to be like him when I grow up.

Yes, I have given him a home and opportunities. But he has rescued me right back. What Josh has taught me:

To stay.

To belong.

To listen.

To commit.

To forgive.

In choosing to parent him, I have also learned to cherish the parts of myself that have, at times felt unlovable, unseen, unheard and abandoned. 

In being Josh’s mum over the years, I have observed how much we grow through healthy, secure relationships. We grow best when we feel safe, seen and important. A child works out who they are through a thousand tiny interactions from those around them: whether they’re safe, wanted, understood, in the way or not making the grade. They sense it through their nervous system when they notice a sigh, a shrug, a look of exhaustion, an embrace, a detail remembered.

Twenty-five years later

Twenty-five years on, we recently went back to Mother’s Choice.

Now with his two mums proudly by his side, Josh had woven a baby blanket to gift to a baby and had embroidered several baby grows with his signature flower, as a way of giving back to the babies still waiting for their forever family.

A full circle moment.

I think back to the young woman who flew out on her 24th birthday ready for adventure, ready to serve, hungry to change the world. She was brave, naive, feisty and determined. I am very proud of her.

I think of who I am now: a little less certain, a little less brave, a little more bruised, but very grateful for the risks she took that have paid off.

As parents of a disabled adult who needs 24/7 care, our job is never done. There’s always another meeting to go to, another funding battle to win, another person in power to persuade.We can never know what life is going to throw at us next.

Perhaps one form of healing and recovery is being able to have compassion for who we were then and who we are now, knowing that at any one time, we are simply doing the best we can with the skills we have.

I went to Hong Kong to have an adventure. I had no idea what that adventure would entail. I thought I would work with my hero, helping drug addicts find faith. I didn’t expect a non-verbal child would help me make sense of myself and the world and ultimately help us both find belonging.