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Adoptive Family Group Tours Chile
by Bill Phillips | |
 | In the early morning of June 27, 2006, 13 families from the United States landed in Santiago, Chile to share the experience of visiting the birth country of their adoptive children. The two-week tour, organized by the Ties Program of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, covered three large cities, and more than 1,000 miles of in-country travel. Combined with visiting historic sites and tourist attractions were meetings with an engaging variety of affable and interesting Chileans, and then, more personal meetings with Chilean participants in the birth and adoption of our children. The two accompanying Ties staff members, Paula Bickel and Linda Berman, relieved us of being concerned about the scheduling and organizational details of the trip, which allowed us the leisure of immersing ourselves in the experience itself.
We were met at the airport by a cheerful, almost cherubic gentleman named Jorge Fuentes, who would be our Chilean guide, but would become much more — friend, mentor to the kids, social worker, mediator, medic and facilitator — even a philosopher and historian engaging us with the soul of his country, which he clearly loved. As the bus sped us on a new expressway from the airport to the high-rise glare of Santiago’s new commercial and hotel district, we listened to
Jorge give the first of his well-spoken cultural and historical stories. The front of the bus came to be known as “Jorge’s office,” and whatever Jorge said was worth hearing.
Twenty-four hours of hotel dining, game room time for kids, and queries between parents started the blending process, where strangers become friends. “You were here in November of 1989? No kidding, we were here just a couple of months earlier and we had the same lawyer and social worker.” Such talk brought the adults together, and whatever the kids were saying seemed to work for them as well. What the kids were thinking wasn’t clear yet, but my son, Alex, was carefully processing everything he was seeing. Just walking on the busy street, he said with emotion and an evident swell of pride,
“Everyone looks like me.” I felt naive, almost negligent, for not anticipating how important such an awareness would be.
Since the Ties Program anticipated that the kids were experiencing multi-dimensional feelings, they had arranged for kids alone” talk sessions led by Berman. The young adolescents always seemed a bit more relaxed after these meetings thanks to Berman, and, in truth, as the tour progressed, Bickel and Berman functioned as house moms for the adults as well.
Touring began in earnest the second morning as Jorge announced from his “office” that we were headed for the historic center of the city. Jorge’s style as both court jester and diplomat became apparent as he skillfully negotiated us past guards and into the courtyard of the presidential palace. The adults and older kids understood the significance of this moment, that we were at the sight of the infamous 1973 “coupe de e’tat,” and that the restored palace was symbolic of the Chilean’s pride in their hard-earned 16 years of democracy.
By afternoon, as was to happen often, our schedule veered from typical tourist fare. The Ties Program had planned for us to visit places where Chilean children, having lost a stable family, were being cared for in a group home setting. At a home for girls sponsored by Santiago’s police member association, we crowded into a small room and met the girls. The Ties staff gave the home a donation that we had collected, and, in return, a girl in the home offered to give a few of our girls some Santiago “dance lessons.” The lessons started slowly but inevitably became a party and warmed the interior of the home in spite of the cold Santiago winter rain outdoors. Only two days into the visit, there was a feeling in the air that this trip could become more than the sum of the events, that each of us would not return as the same person who had arrived.
Bickel had been hinting at this, but what she meant wasn’t clear. If I am typical of the parents, I was focused more on being in the right place at the right time, and not losing anything or anyone. The youngsters, I’m assuming, were not worried about either, but were wide-eyed and open for whatever the moment held. I surmised that under their playful manner, they were thinking, “Wow, we’re not in Kansas anymore; we are where I’m from and it’s at the other end of the world.”
What the trip might become was clearer after the third day, which was unscheduled for the group. Individual families were on their own and some had planned meetings with social workers, Chilean foster parents, and even Chilean siblings.
For privacy’s sake, much of this didn’t get announced, but it was clear that important things were happening. I had known ahead that we would visit the hospital where Alex was born, but I hadn’t anticipated that it would be a dramatic event. Alex, his mom and I, accompanied by Jorge as translator arrived at what we thought would be a quick tour of the hospital.
We were greeted by Eliana Diaz, head nurse of the infant’s ward, and discovered that she had taken great interest in preparing for this meeting even to the point of researching Alex’s hospital records. A long time employee, she had been at the hospital when Alex was born and took us to the ward where he stayed as a baby, and introduced us to the nurse who had cared for him. The nurses all hugged us, showering Alex with affection, as a returning child of their own. They asked many questions about his life and seemed to want to know that he had lived a good life since leaving their care.
Finally, Eliana Diaz, a devout Catholic, took Alex to the hospital chapel and sat him down, praying for him and wishing him a blessed life. No dry eyes were present. That night in the hotel Alex accessed his weblog and with intense feeling relayed his experience for all his U.S. friends to read.
It had seemed like a full trip already, but most of the travel and encounters lay ahead. Three times during our visit we flew LAN Chile Airlines within the country — several hundred miles to the north to the seaside city of La Serena, and then hundreds of more miles south of Santiago to the wintry city of Temuco. A brisk schedule got us up early and sometimes back to the hotel late.
Every cultural experience from visiting a Mapuche Indian home, to shopping in the indigenous markets of La Serena and Temuco added layers to our identity with our children’s native land and to their growing sense that they had a second home. Much time spent on the bus cemented the friendships of parents with each other and kids with each other. Jorge continued his historic narratives, telling not only the story of his country, but helping construct our own story as it progressed. He took us to the top of a desert like mountain observatory in the remote, clear sky areas near La Serena. Somewhat tongue in cheek he played Wagner’s Thus Spake Zarathustra from 2001 Space Odyssey as web wound our way up the mountain roads to view the southern hemisphere sky through the telescopes. Further south, during a delicious 4th of July lunch on the Pacific shore, he serenaded us with the Star Spangled Banner followed by the Chilean national anthem, a duet with bus driver Gabriel.
The Ties program had planned another visit to a home for children, an SOS village, part of a worldwide German charity, where youngsters live in cottages with house mothers. Each family spent time in one of the cottages and then we gathered for a dance program that the village planned for us, during which the Ties Program presented a donation to the school. An unplanned soccer game followed between our teenagers and the SOS soccer players. Our teens, not unexpectedly, generated some romantic energy in their midst, which was nice to see, and at the same time added to parental vigilance and some consensus on hotel curfews. The youngsters never left the hotels without adult company much as would be the case with any touring group anywhere. Our youngest tourist was 5 years old and the teens’ ages ranged up to 18.
Though everyone might change a little something about the tour, I can’t imagine a better-planned adventure. We experienced equal shares of the splendor of the Chilean geography, the many sides of Chile’s people, and encounters with birth origins. One family had slipped away from the guided tour for a couple of days and came back with the story of an unexpected meeting with a birth mother. Though no one publicly announced these events it was clear that they were happening for some and were important and emotional experiences.
Close to the end of our stay, which ended as well as began in Santiago, each family had a prearranged dinner with a Chilean family in their home. These families volunteered to welcome us into their homes, and it was another bond for us. Many of us have remained in contact with these families by e-mail.
One more dinner remained at a restaurant featuring a floorshow of Chilean folk music and dances. The musicians played through all their Chilean themes and concluded with a lengthy rock and roll set which emptied the seats of the adults and teens in our group ending the trip on a high festive note.
Though, if I had to pinpoint the essence of the trip, it would be at a quieter moment, one in which we were traveling the narrow roads of the arid Elqui River Valley. The barren mountains surrounding the valley were dotted with vineyards that flourished through irrigation in summer, but were without fruit or leaf during this winter period. We were at the grave of Gabriella Mistral, Chile’s first Nobel Prize winner for poetry, lesser known to us than Pablo Neruda, who received the prize some 20 years later. Though she died on Long Island near New York, Gabriella Mistral requested that she be buried in her beloved mountain town where she had taught school as a young woman. As we visited her grave, the quietness and the isolation of the setting was poetic in itself, and our young companion Isabel Gordon, a creative writing student from Milwaukee, sat in front of the grave in complete serenity, as if she had found her muse. Upon return she summed it up, “I now have two homes.”
And probably the vision of those mountains at that moment is one of the most persistent images that returns to us when we think of Chile and our child’s origins. The words of Gabriella Mistral speak for us.
“Let’s dance on the land of Chile . . . the land that breeds a people sweet of heart and speech.”
Bill Phillips is a native of North Carolina and graduated from Duke University in the late 60s. He taught high school history and later worked in educational administration, social work and arts education in North Carolina schools. Phillips
is the adoptive parent of Alex from Chile.
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