More About the Trip

Thanks for being excited for us!  I'm planning to blog about our preparations and hopefully throughout the trip.

What we know so far is that we will be in South Africa for just over two weeks, with most of that time spent around Pretoria and Johannesburg.  My parents are coming with us.  (Hooray!  And also, Whew!)

We started saving for this trip almost immediately after we came home with Sparkle in 2003, so we've been looking forward to it for a long time.

We have only one major goal:  Have fun in South Africa!

Even before we met Sparkle, we had some ideas about when we might visit South Africa again.  This may turn out to be flawed logic, who knows, but here's what we've thought about visiting the country of our internationally adopted child.  We don't want visiting his birth country to be a one-time-only event.  We want South Africa to be a real place for us, not just a travel destination, or, in Sparkle's mind, the mythical land of giraffes and Nelson Mandela.  If it's at all financially possible, we'd like for him (really, for all our family) to have a whole collection of memories and plans about time spent in South Africa.  At this point, we hope this will be the first of three family trips to South Africa.  (I'm cringing a little because it sounds... ambitious... to think we can go three times when so far we haven't even been back once.  I suppose we'll start saving again as soon as we get home.)

We want to go once when Sparkle is young enough to anticipate going to South Africa as an adventure, but not feel a lot of pressure to Explore His Roots.  We want him to come away from the trip basically just with a positive impression of South Africa, some exciting memories of time together, and a positive (if very tentative) self-identification as a South African.

It seems to me (and obviously this is just me, a non-adopted white woman), that it would be hard to identify with a culture and country that you know next to nothing about.  Honestly, right now Sparkle knows that South Africa is far away (he can usually find it on a map or globe but not always), there are lions and giraffes there but no tigers, and Nelson Mandela was president, and his first mother lives there.  I'm simplifying a little, but basically he only knows what we tell him, and has very little personal feelings about South Africa that are actually based in his experience.

Right now he may be too young to fully appreciate the experience of traveling to South Africa, but in a way, that's kind of the point.  I want him to grow up into the experience of being a Black South African American.  And having some personal experience of actually being South African in South Africa seems kind of critical to that goal, you know?

Already, I can see him exploring this a little.  He asked yesterday, "When we go to South Africa, will I still be African American?"

I think it's a darn good question. 

(I'm so proud of him, by the way.  Have I mentioned that?)

Somewhere along the line I read that sometimes an adopted kid might get nervous about seeing first family or traveling to the area where he was born because he wonders if he's going to get left there again.  We didn't want Sparkle to be nervous about that at all, so we have looked at the calendar to see the date we leave, the days we'll be in South Africa, the day we leave South Africa, and the day we'll get home.  We made sure he knew we are all going, and we are all coming back.  Either we calmed that fear pretty effectively, or he hasn't felt nervous about being left so far, because it hasn't come up at all.

It will be interesting to see what questions or expectations he has as we get closer to the trip. 

I feel like I'm rambling a bit now.

In the next few months, I'd like to blog about what we're planning to do in South Africa, our tentative hope that we might be able to contact Sparkle's first family, and our plans for visiting South Africa several times as Sparkle grows up. 

Comments

[haze]

I'm loving the 3-visit approach. I'm going to consider that for my own child.

[Leigh]

It sounds like your goals for Sparkle and the family on this trip are very realistic. I look forward to reading. What fun to have the parents on a big trip such as this.

You've got one smart kid - that's a big question about still being African American!

[Kat]

Oh my goodness, this is so exciting! What a sweet boy - I love that line of thinking:) You'll have to take SO many pictures!

[Angela]

How exciting...that is great that your parents are going too. I was telling my husband that the next time we vacation I'll be bringing my mom except in our case I want to be selfish and sneak in a few activities w/ hubby alone!LOL

[cloudscome]

It's going to be a great trip. You've put so much thought into it already. Thanks for sharing your ideas and plans with us.

[Lisa M]

Oh, I really think that is neat. So very neat. I wish you well on your adventure. Can't wait to hear about the preparations and I look forward to the trip reports!

I just think- its a fantastic idea.

[Teena]

We had an amazingly wonderful experience returning to Ethiopia with our children. It was so nerve wracking before we went -- such a big trip, logistics, nerves about meeting with birth relatives, etc. But it turned out to be so positive. We also hope to return multiple times so as to not have this a one-time event, but rather an ongoing connection to country and family. Best wishes on your trip!
-Teena
(also a white adoptive parent of 2 black children and from a transracial, 2 born in, 2 adopted in family)

[Kohana]

I love the way you are planning on keeping Sparkle connected to S. Africa. I'm going to keep that approach in mind!