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Saturday, Nov 22, 2008
Lunch on Saturday is a chunky Indian yoghurt soup, rice pilaf and spicey chutneys with turkey burgers; also on the menu is a meal of potato chips and hot dogs. The Indian children, almost without exception, head straight for the hot dogs. Their parents dutifully slurp the Indian soup.
"It smells funny," says one little girl, wrinkling her nose, as her mom encourages her to try the soup.
"It does smell funny," the mother agrees, but bravely downs a spoonful anyway.
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The first heritage camp was reportedly founded in the late 1970s by Holt International, a foreign adoption service, at the request of adult adoptee clients who felt they would have benefited from some cultural education as children. But it wasn't until the 1990s, as foreign adoption exploded, that the heritage camp phenomenon really caught on.
Today, there are dozens of camps tailored for children from a number of countries, although a majority are for Asian or, specifically, Korean children (almost 10 percent of all foreign adoptees are from South Korea). Most camps, like Colorado Heritage Camps, are coordinated by groups of adoptive parents; others, like Holt Heritage Camps, are set up by adoption centers for the families that have used their services. Camps range from short day camps to weeklong sleepover camps; some invite the adopted children only, while others are for the entire family. The curriculum is typically the same for all the camps: a mix of ethnic crafts, dancing, sports, cooking, perhaps a dash of history or language, and a number of discussion groups where kids or parents talk about identity, heritage or adoption issues.
Colorado Heritage Camps, one of the most comprehensive heritage camp companies, runs eight camps every summer. Although the camp was initially founded 11 years ago by a group of parents of Korean children, Pam Sweetzer and her husband Dan -- themselves the adoptive parents of two children, from Korea and East India -- took over the organization nine years ago and have since expanded to cover an ever-growing range of ethnicities, from Russian to Chinese. Next year, they'll add a Cambodian camp to the list as a response to the requests of the parents who have attended (many of whom have multiple adopted children from different countries). "They just keep spawning these other camps!" laughs Pam Sweetzer, a friendly blond woman in her 40s.
Sweetzer runs the organization as a nonprofit, and the camps are heavily staffed by volunteers, who include adoptive parents, who help coordinate events, and local ethnic community members, who offer cultural expertise for the workshops and serve as camp counselors for the kids. Every summer, more than 900 adopted children and their parents participate in the camps, along with roughly 1,000 counselors and volunteers.
This year at East Indian Heritage Camp, for example, dozens of volunteers from the Denver-area Indian community have arrived to teach the kids yoga and Indian dancing, mehndi ceremonial tattoos, cricket, cooking, storytelling and Indian cinema. Parents attend cultural workshops like "Indian Caste System" and "Indian Wedding," as well as group roundtables discussing subjects ranging from attachment issues and adoption advice, to racism and identity issues. Some 165 children are attending this year; almost all of these children are adopted (a small number are their siblings).
East Indian Heritage Camp often seems like a lesson in multicultural political correctness. Parental enthusiasm for slurping Indian soup or learning about the caste system frequently outweighs the enthusiasm of the kids for the same things; perhaps because the parents are already biased toward a cultural education. "The families often wind up embracing the cultural activities more strongly than the kids do: often, they've made the decision to adopt from [a foreign country] because they are drawn to that culture, and they want to pass their enthusiasm on to their kids," says Dr. Dana Johnson, director of the International Adoption Clinic at the University of Minnesota. "But it's like anything that parents are enthusiastic about: Sometimes the kids embrace it as well, at other times it's like 'We have had enough of this stuff.'"
Running through the adult enthusiasm for all things foreign, however, is their concern that their kids might not think that being Indian is cool; that they'd be embarrassed about their place of birth or, worse, resentful. Since the parents themselves usually aren't Indian, they feel like the next-best place to teach those kids how to feel proud is at a heritage camp. ("Homeland tours," organized to take families with adopted families back to the country of birth, are another fast-growing response to this need.)
Gregory Keck, an adoption therapist and director of the Attachment and Bonding Center of Ohio, says that heritage camp can serve as "compensation" on the part of white parents who worry they've somehow done their kids wrong simply by adopting them. "There's this idea that we are taking kids away from their culture, and that you can do a number of things to help the child retain their culture, but I don't think you can," says Keck. "The fact is that when you leave a culture you are born into and come to America, you grow up as an American kid."
The parents, for their part, do seem to recognize that their kids are fully American (and Americanized); but they see the camp as an opportunity for their kids to be All-American and Indian -- superkids, essentially, schooled in two cultures. Nelly Gupta, a Westchester mother from Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., has come to East Indian Heritage Camp with her Indian-American husband Rishi and their adopted 8-year-old daughter Kiran. Gupta brought her child, she says, because she thought she was "old enough to understand" her heritage.
Gupta says she cried when her daughter carried an Indian flag up to the podium during the opening ceremonies. "I teared up that she might be able to claim, or reclaim, a piece of her identity and heritage," Gupta exclaims. "She's an all-American kid. But it's so important that kids from a third world country feel pride in their heritage -- it's not a Third World hellhole, but a culture that is rich and diverse in its own right. It's empowering."
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