During our trip to Vietnam in June 2010, we visited both orphanages that our daughters had lived in as babies (see trip entries for June 10th and June 12th). Of course, countless photos of our daughters were taken during these visits. We included a selection of those photos on our travel blog. Since then, I have been contacted by many people through the internet (mostly adoptive moms and moms-to-be). These women were either in the process of adopting or they have adopted and are looking forward to some day taking a birth country visit like ours with their Vietnamese-born children.
In late August, a woman contacted me through e-mail. She had found the face of a boy that was yet to be her son in one of the photos from our visit to Go Vap orphanage in June 2010, the same orphanage where Ivy had lived in 2001 when she was almost six months old. She and her husband had received his referral photo in October 2009 when her adoption agency began the paperwork for them to adopt him. There were complications along the way so that they had been waiting and waiting to bring him home.
She contacted me by e-mail in order to ask if we might have any additional photos of him besides the one that she had found on our travel blog. I sent her the other photos that we had taken that happened to have him in them, his crib mate in them, and one of the photos that showed most of the room where he was living.
When I told Ivy and Olivia about this woman and our exchange of e-mail messages, they began a discussion about our trip to Vietnam, their orphanages, and their adoptions beyond any previous discussions that I have tried to start or even overheard. Often when I ask questions on these topics, I receive simple, short answers. This was our most extensive conversation yet on these issues!
Olivia was surprised to consider that this child would grow up speaking a language other than English. She had in her mind the image of Vietnamese adoptees learning English and living in the USA. This boy would be adopted and grow up in Europe. It was interesting to hear them discuss this after they had been so annoyed that people in Vietnam expected them to know how to speak Vietnamese during our trip.
I was surprised by the emotion I felt when Ivy stated, “Technically, this boy is not her son” because the woman and I had both referred to him in these terms. I agreed with her, but also had the opportunity to explain the future mom’s perspective from my own experiences as an adoptive mother. I was able to describe to them how I felt when I received their referral photos, how I studied every detail of the photos while feeling in my heart that the girl in those photos was my daughter, and how I began busily planning our lives together.
Finally in October, the woman and her husband were able to travel to Vietnam to meet their son. I excitedly followed their travel blog and reminisced about our travel to meet our daughters. They officially adopted him and they are now “technically” his parents!
While I was translating their trip updates and studying the photos of their first meeting with their son at the same orphanage where we met Ivy, I suddenly realized that their son was wearing one of the shirts that we had donated to the orphanage this summer during our visit, a toddler-sized shirt with a Boeing 777 on the front. This is a large orphanage in Ho Chi Minh City with, I believe, 200+ children living there. It was a wonderful surprise to be contacted initially about the photos and then an amazing coincidence that this boy met his forever family while wearing a shirt that both of our daughters had worn and outgrown. I was thrilled once more when I was able to find photos of our little Ivy wearing this same shirt.
