Do everything you can to participate in the Tour Korea! Birthland Tour. Your experience, and most importantly the experience with your child, sibling, parent, spouse, friend, or loved one, will forever be a treasured shared experience in your lives. More than any adventure or vacation you have taken, Tour Korea has a depth of layers that can only be experienced first hand.
The planned itinerary from CH/LSS is exciting and full of beautiful sights, enriching history, awe inspiring temples, and phenomenal tastes. CH/LSS balances the tour beautifully. The post adoption workers and staff facilitate the tour amazingly well so that you and your family may fully immerse yourself in the personal experience and let go of all the technicalities of travel. You can trust the staff to orchestrate the tour seamlessly and respectfully so that the richness and quality of the trip can be experienced fully. The anticipation, the saving, the packing, the planning, the flight… all of these preparatory phases are long and tiring but then… you arrive, you are immersed, and the experience is yours.
More than any adventure or vacation you have taken, Tour Korea has a depth of layers that can only be experienced first hand.
During every stage of parenthood we’ve received ample advice, solicited or unsolicited, here is a little more: During Tour Korea, listen to your own advice, trust yourself, trust your children. Give yourself the permission to absorb your experience and to absorb your child’s experience. The days are packed with opportunities and choices. So sure, go ahead and choose what you wish, there is no right or wrong agenda. Give yourself permission for each hour of a day to be different; a contemplative temple visit compared to a bustling afternoon at a market elicit remarkably different responses. So trust your instincts, respect where you, your children, your spouse or loved one is at that hour. Then, observe when it is right for you and the people you love to step back, breathe, and integrate some of your personal experiences. Pay attention. This reflection may happen on a morning walk, it may happen before you sleep, as you sleep, or on the bus staring out the window and blocking out all the conversations around you. Whenever these intermittent times are, when you and the people you love find the quiet necessary to really soak in the experiences, respect them. You may notice that some of your reflections are joyful, some are painful, many are mixed, all are valid.
Being in the environment of their adoption agency, reviewing the records of their birth, hugging a foster parent, or looking in the eyes of a birth relative are fundamentally intimate moments. Just be present, absorb.
Most intimately, many participants will have varying degrees of exploring their own birth stories. Words can’t articulate the emotions that are stirred at these times throughout the tour; words are not needed, just acceptance and our unconditional love. Being in the environment of their adoption agency, reviewing the records of their birth, hugging a foster parent, or looking in the eyes of a birth relative are fundamentally intimate moments. Just be present, absorb. Our guides will remind you to record as much as you can—this is so true so, yes, ask someone to take as many notes as possible, but then just be present. Again, believe in your child, believe in the person you love. During Tour Korea! what had previously been a picture, a record, or a story of their adoption, becomes a palpable, tangible living experience. As parents, especially as adoptive parents, we all share an intentional decision to parent our child/children. So, choose to intentionally absorb your child’s history as much as you possibly can. Indisputably, do everything you can to participate in the Tour Korea! trip.
About the Author: This was written by an adoptive parent who participated in one of CH/LSS’s 2016 Tour Korea! birthland tours.
Register for Tour Korea! 2018 Save $100 if you register by December 22!
