2007-06-12 10:13:57 -
COLUMBIA, Missouri (AP) - Orphaned in the Vietnam War and adopted in the United States, Tami Herman knew she did not look like the other kids. She desperately wanted to fit in.
The Vietnamese dolls went into the trash.
But when Herman, 33, was ready to start her own family, adopting a child from her homeland «was a
given.
So was preserving her daughter's sense of self. In her comfortable suburban playroom, 7-month-old Olivia Grace has a room full of traditional Vietnamese toys and clothes.
Adoption agencies that specialize in the Asian country note that a growing number of Vietnam War orphans raised in the United States are making the same trip their adoptive parents took more than three decades ago.
The connection runs deeper than any physical resemblance, said Herman and others in similar situations.
They describe a bond by birthright, a shared background they anticipate will strengthen family ties.
«It's definitely easier on the child,» said Jynger Roberts, director of Vietnam adoptions for Dillon International, an Oklahoma-based adoption agency serving Midwest families. «The parent can relate so much more to ... what the child went through.
Exact numbers are difficult to come by, and Vietnam recently lifted a three-year moratorium on adoptions by U.S. residents. But Roberts and other adoption counselors suggest that the number of Vietnamese orphans brought to the United States is greater than before the moratorium.
Herman and her husband Jason, who was born in the United States, returned to Missouri in May with Olivia, a girl with deep brown eyes whose biological parents sent her to a Kien Giang orphanage in the Mekong Delta.
The Hermans' trip was arranged by Children's Hope International. Of the seven couples on the trip, four included a spouse who was born in Vietnam.
Rob Slaubaugh, a social worker in Harrisonburg, Virginia, was among them. He was one of hundreds of Vietnamese orphans crammed onto a cargo plane as part of Operation Babylift, a mass evacuation in the days before the fall of Saigon in 1975.
He arrived in Chicago as an infant, and grew up on a Mennonite farm in Wolford, North Dakota, near the Canadian border.
«There wasn't another Asian in two states,» Slaubaugh joked.
When it came time to adopt their own child, Slaubaugh and his wife Amanda agreed they would go to Vietnam.
They returned home with 2-year-old son Ben in late May. The trip to his birthplace was Slaubaugh's first.
«My adoptive son and I will have a similar bond,» he said. «Both of us were abandoned by our mothers at the hospital.
