Wednesday

The next morning we met Molly at her house to have breakfast with her and Dr. Cho and Director Shin.  What a great time of food and fellowship and we were able to join in on their morning bible reading.  I loved the fact they had bibles that were written in both English and Hangul, I need to get one of those!

As Molly was drawing out a map of how to get to the Holt Post Adoption Services offices, Director Shin came in and said there would be someone going into Seoul to pick up the volunteer hair dressers that come in every first Wednesday and that he could drop us off by the Holt offices, bonus!!  Would have been interesting to see how my friend and I would have managed the bus ride!

The driver dropped us off on this one street and waved toward a street so we got out of the van and had no clue where the heck we were.  I pulled out the map Molly had drawn out and started to look around to see if the drawing matched where we were.  We must have looked completely lost because a gentleman came over to us and looked at the map.  He noticed the word Holt and told us where to go and walked us to the correct street and lo and behold, we walked right to the Holt Post Adoption Services office building!

The purpose of this trip to Korea, when I went on the Motherland tour in 2006, I met a lot of other adoptees and made some wonderful friendships.  One adoptee, in particular, we connected and have remained friends ever since.  She had asked me if she were to travel back to Korea, would I travel with her?  Of course!  Any excuse to travel to Korea, I'm game!  Well, the time had come to travel to Korea, my friend had located her birth mother and birth sister.  This would be my first experience with a birth family meeting...wow, how honored I was that my friend would ask me to be with her on this journey...

Waiting in the room, my friend is nervous, this was it, she was meeting her birth mother and birth sister!!  I didn’t blame her for being nervous, I’m  not sure what I was feeling but think I was nervous for her too.  Had to wait a few minutes since we were early, but I’d rather be early than late for something like this!  The social worker talked about what the process would be for when the family arrived.

Finally, the social worker said the family had arrived, so she opens the door and in walk in my friend’s birth mom and sister, both are crying, the birth sister hugs her first, then the birth mother.  It still is amazing to see my friend look exactly like her sister!  I was busy taking pictures so didn’t have a chance to cry which was totally surprising since I cry at everything!  But I think I knew I had to keep it together for my friend’s sake, like I did whenever I met a flight with a family waiting for their baby.

After about an hour, the meeting was done at the office so now we would all go to lunch with the volunteer interpreter.  Thank goodness there was one!  We all went to the Korean BBQ restaurant that we always go to on every trip.  More questions were asked during lunch and all went well.  It was then decided that we would all go to the sister’s house.  We all sat around some more and talked about family and would have dinner there and also spend the night there, which meant we had to go back to Ilsan to pack some belongings. 

We all packed into a cab and arrived at Ilsan.  As I was packing, I was throwing things into my roller bag trying to gather up all the necessary items.  When we got back to the sister’s house, I realized I had only packed for one overnight…forgot we were traveling with the family and overnighting again.  At least I had a spare shirt already packed in my bag.  I didn’t pack my cell phone charger since I forgot about the two nights out.  Oh well, think I would survive?

Prior to bedtime, my friend’s aunt was coming over to meet her.  Wow, she was quite the character!!  Finally, I had to say I was going to bed, the jet lag was hitting us both.  As we were getting ready, I had to laugh and show my friend the towel we were to use for our showers, they are the size of what we Americans consider to be hand towels and we each got one…um, I use two bath sized towels everytime I shower.

As my friend and I were laying in bed trying to fall asleep, all I could think of was how this reminded me of my last homestay during our family tour in 2009.  The room was hot, no a/c and people and dog noises all over the place.  I don’t think I slept a solid hour at a time, was going to be a long couple of days!