I wish I had a photograph of the people, all of the very many people, in the children’s hospital in Vietnam.

Our daughter Maggie was eight weeks old when I made my first trip to Vietnam. She was outrageously small, had the wildest hair you have ever seen and ate slower than any baby I have every encountered, but seemed healthy overall. The absolute hardest part of Maggie’s adoption was that I had to leave my tiny, wild-haired, slow-eating baby in a crowded government orphanage and come home alone, and wait out a miserable six weeks before I could go back and bring her home for good.

Two weeks before I was to leave, my worst fears came true. We got a phone call and Maggie was in the hospital. She had pneumonia and was very ill. She wasn’t eating well and had a bad cough and fever. The woman in Vietnam that worked for our agency went to the hospital daily to try and get her to eat. I was panicked. Every mother aches when their children are sick, but when your child is sick and on the other side of the world, it is heart ache and worry like no other.

When I finally got on the plane(s), I was wide awake, willing it to go faster the entire trip. When I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City the agency representative who picked me up insisted I take a rest before we went to see Maggie, and I insisted that I wanted to get to that hospital immediately. I won.

The hospital was so different than what we have here in the U.S. that it feels wrong to even call it a hospital. There were armed guards you had to get approval from to get in. The walls were painted bright blue and peeling. Nothing was white or clean. The rooms were jam-packed with people…patients laying on beds and their entire families as well as their dishes, laundry and other personal belongings all around them. It was explained to me that families traveled from far away to bring their children to this hospital and the families often stayed for weeks. The families were responsible for meals and clothes. Laundry was hung everywhere, plastic bowls for eating where piled up in corners and garbage was everywhere.

The beds were cots, and small children were tied to them so that they could not roll off, because there were no railings, or cribs, even though it was a children’s hospital. Nurses came around twice a day to give medications, and doctors came around once a day. There was no system as to which patients were in which room, and patients that came in looking like they may not survive the day, were placed into rooms with toddlers who were almost completely recovered.

There was worry in the air…the smells of sickness and sounds of crying babies and sometimes crying adults.

I was relieved that Maggie looked wonderful when I finally got her in my arms. She no longer had a fever and was eating well. She was only still in the hospital so that she could finish her course of medicine…no taking home antibiotics were allowed. I was desperate to get her out of there…even more so when a fourth roommate was added to her room…a gorgeous little girl who didn’t make a sound beyond a whimper and a bone-rattling cough.

When I finally convinced the doctor that Maggie was well enough to leave and I was more than capable of caring for her, I turned and looked at the people we had been sharing the room with. We could not speak the same verbal language, but the language of worry in a mother’s eyes is universal. I could not imagine having my child’s health and well-being resting on the hopes of such a place. I walked out of that hospital with great relief, and yet at the same time great guilt, that this world was not my reality.

Yes, I wish I had a photograph of that hospital…of the hallways filled with sick children and worried families, if for no other reason than to be a reminder of how blessed we are with the resources we have, and how blessed I am that my Maggie made it out of there alive and well.