Internaional adoption- nurse/helper?

Question

My friend is adopting a baby from Korea. The baby will come with an adult on the airplane. Does the helper/nurse go right back to Korea? Or will he/she stay to help get the family and baby adjusted?

Answer 1

I'm a Korean adoptee...living in Korea.  Your friend is in for quite a ride.  

Advice:

Let the child explore his/her culture.  Offer him/her the chance to learn Korean.  Talk about racism.  Talk about Korea.  Don't force anything.  Try to meet other adopted families and Korean people.  Don't act colorblind and pretend she/he is white.  Don't overreact when he/she starts to ask questions.  Even though the parent may not care about race, the rest of the world does.  

Read "Outsider's Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption" to get an idea of what adult adoptees think...NOT the usual literature written by social workers and adoptive parents.

Your question?  Either someone will stay with you, or a contact will be available.  Either way, a follow up home study occurs for several months after to check up on the baby.

Answer 2

Very often the people who escort children are not nurses from the orphanage, but other people who wish to help out.

I know of a couple who adopted in Korea. They travelled to Korea to adopt the baby there, and when they travelled home, they were  asked to escort two other children to the U.S. to meet their families there.

So it might not be a "nurse" but someone who is somehow involved in Korean adoption, who is asked to look after the kids on the flight. They  often are not people who know the kids very well. And they are not responsible for helping getting the children to adjust to their new families.

We adopted in China twice. Each time, we travelled to China (that's Chinese law, you must travel. I'm so glad we did, BTW.)

We were able to meet the orphanage personel, each time. But only on the first adoption did we really spend time with the person who really took care of our daughter in the orphanage. She came up to our hotel room (without a translator) and showed us how to feed our new daughter, she showed us how our daughter liked her bottle prepared. We spoke no Chinese and she spoke no English, but somehow we communicated. After that, the orphanage director and pediatrician came by every day to check on the children.

But with our seocnd adoption, it wasn't like that. They helped us out the first night with our children, and were there the next morning with formula (none of the children were taking bottles the way we were preparing them) but after that, we were completely on our own.