A New Kind of Trip

Bengbu is very near and dear to my heart, but my children are not from that orphanage.  My family photo is absent from the collage I put together for the staff. 
Providing assistance to the orphanage and strengthening links between the orphanage and adoptive families have provided me with such joy and happiness.  I have commiserated with parents on various topics and concerns that parents have -- baby trafficking, RAD, developmental issues, orphanage care, and birthparent searches.  While our children grow before our eyes, we talk about the day when our children will come to us with questions, and we theorize on how we will answer them.  We search websites, listen to "experts", pay money for finding ads.  We feel guilt as well as sympathy.  We hope our manic questions and searches will somehow make that phrase better when we face our children and utter those words we dread to say,
"I'm sorry, but this is all I know".
I can picture their faces, looking at me with despair, those unanswerable questions still remaining unanswered.  I won't be able to give them what they need to know.
Parents often apologize to me after their barrage of questions, which often turn confrontational and angry.  They sense deception, or perhaps even make it up in their own head in order to be angry and scream into the darkness and the mystery of their child's beginnings.
I know the feeling.
But I never expected that a confident young woman, a Bengbu adoptee, would approach me, and ask me, "I want to go to Bengbu".  She wanted to do something for the children, and see the place of her birth.  She had examined a lot of heritage trip packages, but asked if there was something she could do with me.
I was terrified at first.  I knew I was approaching that precipice of uttering that dreadful phrase.  Then I was humbled and honored.   A voice came from inside me, and I swear it wasn't mine, that responded, "of course, let's do that".
I have watched as other adoptive families have gone on heritage tours, and have wondered about the epiphanies they experienced.  Our daughters still have not expressed interest in returning to their orphanages or examining their roots, but perhaps this is because I have infused their lives with "China" on a constant basis with my charity work and my personal love for the country.
This bright young woman, just 4 years older than our oldest daughter, told me that she felt the same way, up until her first year of college, when she began feeling the need to connect with her roots.