Heritage Camp

A theme of the some of the last few blog entries seems to be “heritage,” and specifically honoring the heritage of the children who do not share our culture or race. This is a lesson I’ve been aware of for a long time, and I have tried to right by my girls over the years, but I suspect, like many adoptive parents, I have also been guilty of succumbing to the pressures of every day life, and not always being sensitive to the issue. It is easy to push the reality of our children’s different heritage on the back burner as we deal with the daily struggles of life.

In addition to getting caught up in the daily pressures, I also believe that parents can truly forget that their children were born in a different country or have a different color of skin. We love all of our children the same whether or not we gave birth to them, so we don’t see them differently. But, as one of my friends told me last summer, “that doesn’t mean that they [our children who have been adopted transracially or transculturally] don’t have different needs.”
So, this friend attended one of the heritage camps last summer.  After returning from the Colorado camp, she was so enthused about the experience that she wanted to create something here in town for some of the other kids from India. We are fortunate in that we have a relatively large cluster of girls who were born in India and all live within a ten mile radius of my friend and me. The camp was a great success–for three days the girls learned about their heritage through music, books, films, dance and food. It was so successful that we are going to do it again this summer.

Because it was such a nice experience for the girls (and their parents) I am going to spend the next couple of blogs reporting about it, as well as share some ways that others might create the experience for their children.

Photo Credit

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