As if we hadn’t embarrassed him enough, how about posing in front of school as your classmates are released?
The night of Chad’s incident, I messaged with the agency director at Lifeline and told her what was going on. She is a wise lady with lots of experience- she has seen it all. She e-mailed her in-country representative because she was also concerned, and “Lily” called Susan, our guide, to talk to her about it. She wanted Susan to go to the director to get to the bottom of this since it is concerning, and to find out if there has ever been any indication of self-harming behaviors. Susan pulled the former director, Bo Pin, aside, and asked her more about it, and they all sat him down to clean and re-bandage his wounds. Bo Pin told Susan that he has never done anything like this, he is always “sunshine boy” and everybody loves him (he is a favorite!). She pointed to his shorts that we had him dressed in. She said he has never worn shorts before. He does not like his legs and his feet, and he is embarrassed and self-conscious about how he looks after his surgery. He is afraid he will be teased and he thinks his legs are ugly. She talked to Li Xiao Qiang a while and then also said that he thought that the “fur” on his legs was too long, and that if he had to wear shorts, at least he could remove the “fur” to make his legs more attractive. My heart just melted. I had laid out an outfit for him each day (shorts, because it’s really warm here now), and he put it on, and never wanted to tell me he didn’t want to wear it, and all this time this we have added stress on top of stress for him, to have him parading around in public with his bare legs that he hates, for all the world to see. I felt terrible! He was too polite and sweet to tell me how the shorts made him feel.