It’s No Vacation, but Adopting From Abroad Can Be the Trip of a Lifetime

I once met a man in a guest house in New Delhi with a newly adopted Indian baby. His wife had stayed home in Seattle with their other children, so he was on his own, coping with bureaucrats, paperwork and the infant--but calmly and patiently, like a pro. At breakfast one morning, he touched the child’s deformed lip and said, matter-of-factly, “We’ll have that taken care of when we get home.” His courage was unforgettable.

Visiting a Third World country is difficult enough, so I can hardly imagine what it must be like to travel to Russia, Eastern Europe, China, India or Vietnam--the sources for most foreign adoptions these days, experts say--to adopt a baby.

The culture shock travelers experience in those countries is coupled with the greater shock of sudden parenthood. Moreover, adoption trips can be long and complicated, lasting an average of two weeks, said Janice Pearse, international director for Adoptions Together, a Maryland-based agency. The trips can involve visits to out-of-the-way orphanages, city halls and consulates.

For this reason, some adoptive parents have their children brought to the U.S. by escorts like Katy Lang of Seattle, who has been to India five times to pick up children.

Lang, who decided to serve as an escort because she loves India, found it physically and emotionally exhausting to see the orphanages and to bring the children home on long-haul flights. “Even though you’re with the kids a relatively short time, you bond with them,” she said. “I used to come home and cry.”

Lang hasn’t been called on to be an escort much lately because many adoptive parents make the trip abroad themselves, she said. By all accounts, it’s the trip of a lifetime.

Sandy Lachter of Washington, D.C., said her journey to China in 1998 to pick up her daughter, Amelia, was the “high point of my life.”

“I went into it with blind faith, thinking everything would be all right--and it was,” said Lachter, a self-proclaimed optimist. But other adoptive parents--particularly single moms--have found adoption trips terrifying and emotionally overwhelming.

If you’re considering a foreign adoption, there are convincing reasons for making the trip yourself (besides the fact that many countries, like China, require it). Pearse of Adoptions Together reminds adoptive parents that a child’s homeland is part of his or her identity. It’s crucial for parents to remember the dislocation they felt when visiting their child’s native country because it helps them understand what their child is experiencing in America.

A colleague who made her first trip to Asia in 1995 to adopt a Chinese baby girl vividly remembers the banquet for her group of adoptive American parents at a state orphanage in the southern Chinese province of Guangzhou. The memory has become a story she tells her daughter and is the first page in her baby book.

Linda Pearl of L.A. went to a place she’d never heard of--Astrakhan, Russia--to get her daughter, Olivia. The city near the Caspian Sea was more beautiful than she had imagined. And though the cement-block orphanage was understaffed and poor, she said it was “clean, bright and sunny.”

I heard wonderment in the voices of many mothers when they described visiting the orphanages where their adopted children came from because the institutions were better than they imagined they would be. “These orphanages may have different standards of hygiene than we do, but they are doing the best they can,” says Wendy Basil of Ventura County, who adopted a daughter from China and another from Vietnam.

Orphanage caregivers often bond with the children, Basil said, so meeting the new parents and learning firsthand the little ones are headed for good homes bolsters their confidence in the international adoption process.

Several Internet sites offer packing lists, travel tips, money-management strategies and advice on gift-giving (which officials in foreign countries sometimes expect). Among the Web sites: Families With Children From China (https://www.fwcc.org) and AdoptionTravel.com (https://www.adoptiontravel

.com). Many U.S. adoption agencies give their clients similar information and do the trip planning.

For those faced with making their own arrangements, there are travel agencies that specialize in foreign adoption, such as JC Travel in San Francisco, which sends about 800 parents to China every year, and Federal Travel in Florida, run by Timothy D. Swanson, who is familiar with the rigors of such trips because he has adopted a child from Chile and another from Paraguay. Professionals like Swanson can negotiate the best air fares for adoption trips, which often must be scheduled at the last minute, and they know which airlines are especially friendly to adoptive parents (China Southern, Delta and Lufthansa, Swanson says).

Adoption experts tell parents to learn as much as they can about their child’s homeland, talk to others who have made the trip recently and never pass judgment on a different culture. Above all, prospective parents are advised not to make the trip alone. They need an extra pair of hands to carry luggage and handle the new baby, and the emotional support of a family member or a friend. Having a companion also helps frazzled new parents take in as much as they can so they’ll have rich details in the story they tell their children.

JC Travel can be reached at (800) 227-3920 or (415) 834-1116, Internet https://www.jc-travel.com; Federal Travel at (800) 551-8666 or (954) 942-8666, Internet https://www.federaltravel.com.