DEKALB, Ill. (AP) - Pooja Ballantine came home from school, grabbed a bagel and sat on a couch in the living room, surrounded by her adoptive family.
Pooja is a 22-year-old Kishwaukee College student. In her free time she likes to hang out with her friends and play outdoor sports. In 2002, she was adopted from an orphanage near New Delhi, India, by Diane DeMers and Dave Ballantine, a DeKalb couple.
But despite spending the past 13 years of her life in the United States, Pooja said she still feels more Indian than American.
“I kind of miss my culture, like all the traditions that we did when I was in India,” she said.
American citizens adopt thousands of international children every year, according to data from the U.S. State Department. For DeKalb County families with children adopted from abroad, a cornerstone of raising international children is helping them remain in touch with the cultures into which they were born.
Nearly 7,100 children were adopted internationally in the federal fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2013. It’s a sharp decline from 21,654 in 2003. Illinois accounted for 319 of the adoptions in fiscal 2013, making it the state with the fourth-highest number of adoptions.
In 2013, there were 119 children adopted from India, down from 461 in 2002, when Pooja came to the U.S.
DeMers, who also had adopted her son, Keerti Ballantine, from India in 1996, said the choice of the country wasn’t coincidental.
“When we were looking at adopting, we became interested in India because my husband and I had good friends who were Indian and felt that they had introduced us,” she said. “We had enough knowledge of the Indian culture that we felt comfortable to be able know how to find more.”
Another DeKalb resident, Kate Noreiko, adopted her children Jennifer and John from South Korea when they were infants in the 1990s. After investigating a variety of countries and programs, Noreiko said South Korea seemed like the best fit.
“I’m parenting the children I was meant to parent, although they are from South Korea,” Noreiko said.
DeMers, who lost her biological son, Kevin, to leukemia in 2012, said initially, she and her husband decided on international adoption because it was supposed to take less time than a domestic adoption. Once they adopted from India, she said they decided to stick with the same country.
“We were really happy to build our family that way,” DeMers said. “I have no regrets.”
The walls of DeMers and Ballantine’s home are adorned with pictures of India. Miniature elephants line the mantel. On special occasions, DeMers takes her children to an Indian restaurant near Rockford. Sometimes, she makes Indian dishes at home.
“We can’t really be Indian for our kids,” she said. “But at least we can say to them, ’India was important to you, it’s important to us. However we can help you with that transition to the American culture and still respect the Indian culture, we will do that.’ “
Until she came to the U.S. in 2002, Pooja had never seen snow. She couldn’t speak English and never used an escalator. Life was more “free” in India, she said.
“There’s a lot of laws here, rules,” she said. “In India, people can jump on a train any time they want, but here you can’t do that, you can’t run up to the train and catch it.”
The cultural differences are stark between Pooja and Keerti, who was adopted at age 2. Unlike her brother, Pooja prefers traditional Indian cuisine to American fast food and likes to watch Indian movies that help her to keep up with her native language.
“He is an American, for sure,” she said. “I still have Indian in me.”
Keerti, who is now 21, said he has been living “like a regular American” in his day-to-day life, traveling, going to school and working.
Over the past 13 years, Pooja has come a long way learning the language and adjusting to the academic etiquette, though the process was more difficult because of her learning disability, DeMers said.
Laughing off the differences between her two children, DeMers said Pooja still has one foot in the U.S. and another one in India.
“I think our family has much greater appreciation for different cultures,” DeMers said. “A lot of people in America have just lived in maybe only their own state or only their own community and having been exposed to different religions, I think I wish everybody had the chance to travel abroad and not just to rich countries, but to countries that have a different value system.”
Recalling the poverty she had witnessed on one of her recent trips to India, DeMers said it made her value more what she has, her children echoed.
“When you see that so many people don’t have access to medical care or medical food or whatever,” she said, “(it) makes you more appreciative of what you have in this country.”
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Source: The (DeKalb) Daily Chronicle, https://bit.ly/1uKKevw
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Information from: The Daily Chronicle, https://www.daily-chronicle.com
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