Filling in the Missing Pieces
International adoptees make the journey back to their birth countries.
By Erin Foran
When Peggy and Leo Kennedy landed in Paraguay fourteen years ago, with three-year-old son Brendan in tow, they were filled with hopes and worries. They stepped out into the smell of red clay baking in the sun, a swirl of dust, noise, traffic, street vendors hawking fresh baked bread, and the musical hum of Spanish and Guaraní. They came to meet their new son, Evan.
Evan plays "Ode to Joy" on the recorder for a farewell party in Guatemala City, 2006.
Evan was born Antonio in a Red Cross hospital in Asunción. He spent his first year and a half with a foster mother, Francisca, while across the world in East Lansing, Michigan, the Kennedys sifted through mounds of paperwork and anxiously waited to bring him home. Two years later, Evan and Brendan would stay home and await the return of their parents from Guatemala with news of their newborn sister, Cristina. The entire family would return after eight months to bring her home to Michigan.
The Kennedys each consider themselves part Guatemalan; Paraguayan; Irish; German; North, Central, and South American. Leo is a political scientist, Peggy a full-time mom and part-time counselor. Through international adoption, their family has expanded and their world has shrunk. “Children in other parts of the world do not seem like strangers,” Peggy says. The children she met on trips back to Evan and Cristina’s birth countries are family, too, in a way, because they share a common heritage with her own children. “It is a joy to see the people that resemble our own children. There has been great poverty and political turmoil [in both countries], yet the people go on and survive. It is impressive to see the smiles on faces of the people and to look at the beautiful children, all who have potential in the same way that ours do,” she says.
With the help of the Ties Program, an organization based in Wisconsin that helps adoptive families arrange ‘homeland’ or ‘heritage’ journeys, the Kennedys returned to Paraguay, in 2004, and Guatemala, in 2006, with their children to show them where they came from and to give them memories of their birth countries. “We wanted to have a shared experience of those birth countries as a family,” Peggy says, not just the somewhat taxing experience of traveling there during the initial adoption process. “I wanted to learn what it is like to be Paraguayan,” says Evan, now 15, of his heritage trip. “Going to Paraguay helped me understand who I am.” This is part of the Ties Program’s mission, according to their website: “Helping children see that the people with whom they share their heritage are warm, wonderful, genuine people.”
Cristina (left) and new friend Anna from the Ties program, shopping at Chichicastenango, Guatemala, 2006.
Bea Evans, Co-Director of the Ties Program, explains the heritage journey as a nurturing of personal story and self. Traveling to one’s homeland creates a sense of beginning, a sense of information, place, belonging, and connection. Parents may tell a child early on that she was adopted, describe the experience of how she came to be part of the family, tell her what her birth country looks and smells like. Yet, these memories are not through her own lens. When she visits the country herself, she can fill in the details, create her own memories, and better understand the parts of her life story she can’t remember from when she was very young.
Kathy and Will Beck of Seattle, Washington adopted their daughter Camille at six months old and traveled with her back to Korea when she was twelve. The agency through which Kathy and Will adopted their daughter did not advocate traveling to Korea to unite with her in 1987. Instead, someone brought Camille to them. “The agency discouraging us to travel initially was a real disservice to us as a multicultural family,” Kathy says. Never having been to Korea themselves, the Becks bought traditional Korean clothing and books about the country, and tried to expose Camille to Korean culture through language classes and culture camps. But as Kathy explains, “Our attempts were superficial at best. I think we didn’t really know what Korea was and how to expose her to it, portray it to her,” until they were able to travel and experience Korea together as a family.
Camille is now twenty-two, a recent graduate of the University of Washington. She is slender and freckled, and openly speaks of her life story and her experience as an adoptee. When Camille first traveled to Korea with her parents through the Ties Program, she walked into Kimpo International Airport and was overwhelmed by all of the people speaking Korean. She walked outside to the buses and it was hot and humid. She explains her first thoughts: “I was like, gosh, this is Korea. But where are all the country roads? I had assumptions about Korea being tiny and rural, because in the books that we had, it just showed the countryside, old temples…I expected dirt roads and traditional Korean houses,” not the bright busyness of Seoul. “Right around the corner [from the hotel] was a 7-11,” she says. “I had no idea there were 7-11s in Korea…There was also a Baskin-Robbins and a McDonald’s. I thought, ‘It’s just like America!’”
“Kids that were adopted internationally have different layers of identity,” says Becca Piper, founder of the Ties Program. The program involves social workers from the adoption community to help kids on heritage trips work through their emotions and new discoveries about their culture and identity; this resource means kids are “not only traveling but also processing what it means.” Some families have the opportunity to visit the hospitals where they were born, or to meet their birth and foster families, an experience that can be stressful but also incredibly rewarding.
Ten years old at the time of the Kennedys’ return to Paraguay, Evan Kennedy chose not to meet his birth mother, but he spent time with his foster mother, visited the hospital where he was born, and played with toddlers at the orphanage where he briefly lived. He learned that his foster mother had called him El Rey, “the king.” She wept when she saw him, and treasured the pictures the Kennedys had brought of Evan growing up in Michigan. Evan and his family also visited Luque, his birth family’s hometown, famous for the many jewelry shops lining the old stone streets. He now wears a chain with a Paraguayan silver ring around his neck.
Evan’s sister Cristina Kennedy was nine when the family returned to Central America. Her mom Peggy says Cristina determined the timing for that trip; for a year beforehand, she experienced a great desire to meet her birth mother and an increasing grief about not meeting her. The family knew it was the critical time to take her to Guatemala. Now eleven, Cristina says she remembers dirt roads and the delicious smells of Guatemalan food. Between travel to the Mayan ruins in Tikal, playing soccer with local kids in the rural village of Santiago Zamora, and browsing the open air market in Chichicastenango came the highlight of this trip – a meeting with Cristina’s birth mother at a restaurant in Antigua. They stayed for three hours, sharing pictures, stories (with the help of translators), and some tears. It was difficult for her birth mother to leave Cristina again. “Tú es cerca mi corazón,” Peggy assured her as they parted, “you are in my heart.” For Cristina, the meeting meant knowing that her birth mother was alive and healthy. It meant learning that she has four more brothers and many cousins. Knowing these things, “I feel like my broken heart is now whole,” she says.
The Ties Program works hard to make birth and foster family reunions possible, “but this is not the ultimate goal or always the doable goal,” Becca Piper says. “The bigger goal is coming up with some level of acceptance or experience of what they’re able to find…in traveling and not finding families, there is still closure.” Whether by meeting a foster parent or collecting homeland dirt in little baggies to bring home, “in their own ways, kids are doing things to make sense of the world,” says Piper. She describes one family’s story that sticks with her after many years. On their trip to Korea, the family had arranged to meet the doctor who had delivered their daughter, now eleven. Yet at the hospital, their daughter flitted around the waiting room and couldn’t sit still; the mother felt that the visit was stressful and unproductive. Later, her daughter told her that she sat in every chair in the waiting room because she wanted to make sure she sat in the chair that her birth mother had sat in eleven years before. This was her own way of filling in the missing pieces, and making sense of her journey to Korea.
Camille Beck’s connection with Korea has brought her back eight times since her fist trip in 1999. Korea was her very first home, and now it is her second home away from Seattle. She most often goes to spend time with her birth family, who she was able to meet and stay in touch with since her first trip with Ties. An only child in her adoptive family, Camille has two sisters and a brother in Korea. She laughs as she remembers her birth parents, upon first meeting her, arguing about which sister she looked like most. “Turns out I’m kind of a mix between the two,” she says, smiling. She has also been back to study abroad on her own, and she hopes to go again soon as an English teacher.
Of traveling Camille says, “I think it is definitely an enriching experience whether you’re adopted or not. If you have an interest in your heritage, why not seek out more information about it?” From her own experience, she feels it is particularly important for international adoptees to engage in their heritage by traveling to the country of their birth. “I feel like adoptees are left with many questions,” she says. “We were born in the country, yet we were raised just like any other American. We have such a close connection to the country, yet it is still so far away.”
Camille (fifth from the right) and Korean friends and family enjoying a traditional meal.
For Camille, that gap between the United States and Korea has closed more with each visit. When they first made the trip, her mom Kathy says “being Korean became something real (for Camille), and it made more sense. There was a place to tie it to – there was a visual…I think that was huge for her identity building.” Korea was no longer an abstract picture from a book – it was fresh rice cracker vendors and ginseng chicken, rice fields and bamboo blowing in the wind, bustling streets and even 7-11s.
A heritage journey can be a rewarding and challenging experience for international adoptees of any age. With the support of family, the trip abroad can help adoptees to incorporate and embrace the many pieces of their cultural and familial identity. They are able to spend time with other adoptive families, and form close ties. “I think it’s important to go back and see the culture that – I don’t want to say that I’ve missed out on – but that’s a part of me,” says Camille. “Definitely an important part of who I am is knowing where I came from.”
On their heritage trips, the Kennedys’ missing pieces were filled in too – with Paraguay’s open air markets full of native crafts, fresh chickens, and soccer shoes; with the spray from Iguassu Falls and the smell of carne and creamy “sopa paraguaya” cornbread; as well as with Guatemala’s volcanoes, coffee fields, and colorful local dress. By seeking out and spending time with Cristina’s birth family, the Kennedys were able to ask questions about her background. They were able to thank Cristina’s birth mother for choosing adoption and gifting them with their daughter. They were able to spend time with Francisca, Evan’s foster mother, who just sent him a congratulatory note for his recent Confirmation in the Catholic Church.
Catholics choose a Confirmation name as part of this rite. In a gesture toward his richly layered identity, Evan chose his Paraguayan birth name, Antonio.
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Learn more about the Ties Program at http://www.adoptivefamilytravel.com/
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Erin Foran is an editor for The Wanderlust Review.
Photographs appear copyright and courtesy of the families.
This entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 11:53 am and is filed under Non-Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
