UPDATES........on some of them...

Hey People.....I have some info on some of them....

Mother and Father being interviewed....



Mom knows score on Mother's Day

What a day... Extraordinary moments in ordinary lives

By Peter Rowe
STAFF WRITER

May 8, 2005

The day? Today, Mother's Day.

What will happen? Dorothy DeBolt, an El Cajon resident and former March of Dimes "Mother of the Year," will pretend she is childless.

Really? Yes. Dorothy says she and husband Bob "will escape to somewhere like Palm Springs, eat, drink, make mad love and pretend we were born sterile and raised poodles."

Then what? They'll come home to a stack of cards from their children. Their 20 children. "I will weep at every one of them."

Weep from exhaustion? No. The "kids" are all grown and scattered across the West, from Hawaii to Oregon.

OK, then why the tears? "Every day is Mother's Day to me. Seriously ... I was blessed with 20 fantastic kids – now they are adults – who have given me a whole lot."

Does any Mother's Day memory stand out? In 1997, Dorothy sent each kid a note: "I just want to thank you for not only surviving my bumbling efforts but also continuing to make me so very proud to be your 'Mom.' "


How sweet! "I don't know if it was sweet, but it was sincere."

When did Dorothy become a mother? "In 1947, I got married. Nine months and nine days later, I gave birth to my first child."

How did she acquire the other kids? Dorothy and her husband, Ted Atwood, had four more children and adopted two others.

Then what? Ted died of cancer. As a widow, Dorothy adopted two more, Vietnamese children whose war wounds had left them paraplegic.

How did Bob enter the picture? Via a blind date. Six months later, they were wed in front of Dorothy's nine children and Bob's daughter from a previous marriage. Together, the DeBolts adopted 10 more children.

This morning, what will Bob serve Dorothy for breakfast? "He's probably going to make one of the things we both love, huevos rancheros. And some kind of fruit. At our age, we have to make sure we watch that."

Speaking of age, what is Dorothy's? "I'm 81 and can hardly wait until I reach 90. Each new decade, I've been so blessed."

Have you had an extraordinary day? Contact Peter Rowe at (619) 293-1227 or [email protected]


http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050508/news_lz1c08day.html





THIS IS OLD....BUT IT'S A GOOD READ


Pamela Burdman, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, April 16, 1995

She had never been on a plane before, but the moment the cargo door popped out, Ly Vo knew the C5A Galaxy was going to crash.

It was the spring of 1975, and the Viet Cong were advancing on Saigon. The military plane was just minutes out of Saigon's Tan Son Nhut Airport, on a mission to carry 13-year-old Ly and 242 other children from Vietnamese orphanages to safety and, eventually, to adoptive families in the United States.

Sitting in the cargo hold and staring at blue sky as the wind rushed in, Ly began to feel faint. ``I knew I would probably end up dying,'' she recalls 20 years later. ``Living through the war, we knew that most likely we were going to die. We just didn't know how or when.''

The pilot tried for an emergency landing, but as the jet skidded along the ground, its bottom half tore off and burst into flames. When Ly awoke, she was lying on her stomach in the muddy waters of a rice paddy. A helicopter whirred a few feet above, and an American soldier jumped to her rescue.

Dozens of orphans had died in the crash. Ly suffered severe internal injuries, and her legs were broken in six places, but she survived. Within a week, she was on another plane, on her way out of the country again.

For Ly, the C5A's crash was just another detour on a remarkable odyssey that has taken her from a bombed-out village in the Vietnamese countryside to orphanages in Danang and Saigon, and eventually to the Bay Area, where she now owns a home, works two jobs and is raising a child of her own.

Ly is one of about 2,000 orphans -- many of them sick or disabled -- who were rushed out of Vietnam on commercial and military flights in April 1975, during the anxious days before the fall of Saigon. Some had been found in bundles lying in fields after bombs wiped out villages. Others were brought to orphanage doors by mothers who could not care for them. Some were the children of U.S. servicemen.

Operation Babylift elicited an outpouring of sympathy from the American public. But as with every other aspect of the war in Vietnam, there were recriminations as well: charges that the U.S. government was ``kidnapping'' children for propaganda purposes, questions about placing Vietnamese and mixed-race kids with white parents, custody battles over children whose biological parents resurfaced and a multimillion dollar lawsuit against the Lockheed Corporation, manufacturer of the doomed C5A.

Amid all the controversy, the voices of the children were all but unheard.

Today, most of the airlifted orphans are in their early 20s. Many are exploring their heritage, searching out their roots and visiting their distant homeland. Most were infants when they left -- too young to remember.

But Ly, the oldest among them, can vividly recall the harrowing days that forever changed her life. Crippled from polio at a young age, Ly spent her early years by her mother's side. The slight peasant woman carried her everywhere.

All that changed one morning when Ly was six.

Her mother had made some goi chuon -- rice-paper rolls stuffed with vegetables. Ly was sitting on the floor eating hers, while her mother stood a few feet away, leaning against a post in the family's thatched hut. There was the familiar rumble of bombs exploding, but the sound seemed far off, so they did not bother running for cover.

Suddenly, the booms were much closer and a foot-long piece of shrapnel flew into the hut, ripping through her mother's thigh. That night, on the eve of the Vietnamese New Year, while her father was out searching for a doctor, Ly and her older sisters watched as their mother bled to death.

``In the village your life was hanging on a string,'' says Ly. ``You could survive or not survive within seconds. We were faced with that really early.''

The attacks, by American bombers, evenutally decimated the village. Ly's father took his four children to the nearby city of Danang, where they were split up to live with different relatives. Ly remembers the day her uncle took her to the orphanage. She was never sure why.

``After my mom died, nobody cared for us,'' she says. ``I thought I'd live in an orphanage in Danang forever.''

Because of her polio, Ly was at first grouped with retarded children. To convince the nuns that she was worth sending to school, she spent two years doing chores around the orphanage. When she finally made her point, she still had to get there on her own -- putting thongs on her hands and crawling alongside the other children. Her knees grew thick from callouses.

``I had to challenge a lot in my life at a young age to get things I wanted,'' she says. ``Education was one of them.''

Every few weeks, Ly's father or sisters would come to see her. Like most Vietnamese children, she had always called her parents me and ba, never knowing their family name. One day, when her older sister Huong came to visit, Ly asked if their last name was Nguyen, like so many other kids in the orphanage. Huong laughed, and said their parents were Minh and Kieu Vo.

It would be the last time she saw anyone in her family for more than ten years.

A few days later, a German nurse took Ly to Saigon for an operation on her legs. She was still recovering from the surgery when it came time for the airlift. As a seamstress from the orphanage carried her on board the C5A, Ly pleaded to be left behind. When she arrived at the DeBolt home in Piedmont, Ly was again being carried. Severely injured in the crash, she was bound by a body cast from chest to toe.

Looking around, she thought she was at another orphanage: There were children everywhere, most of them disabled. But her new ``brother'' Tich, also from Vietnam, told her, ``Believe it or not, you're in a family.''

It was a large family -- Ly was the 19th child to join Bob and Dorothy DeBolt in their spacious home. Most were handicapped kids from Vietnam, Mexico and other countries.

Ly had no trouble convincing the DeBolts to send her to school. She was expected to study hard and help care for the seven kids younger than her. She was outfitted with braces and crutches and, in 1976, walked for the first time.

As she learned English, Ly also learned to call Bob and Dorothy DeBolt ``mom'' and ``dad'' and the rest of the children ``brother'' and ``sister.''

But she never stopped wondering about what had happened to her real family. Each time she heard about somebody returning to Vietnam, she would send a letter with them in hopes it would somehow reach those she had left behind. When the war finally ended, Ly's father, Minh Vo, took his other children back to the countryside. They and their neighbors found the spot on the Vu Gia river where the village had been, and began to rebuild their homes.

Vo asked a sister in Saigon to search the orphanages there for his youngest daughter. The aunt had never met Ly, but she found a disabled girl around the same age also named Ly Vo. Assuming she had tracked down her niece, the aunt visited the orphanage a few times n over the next three years. Then the girl died.

Three years later, in 1981, when village officials came to his hut with word of a daughter in America, Minh Vo was dumbfounded.

``Yes I had a daughter named Ly,'' he told them. ``But if she's in the United States, I know nothing about that.''

The officials handed him Ly's letter -- it was the tenth she had written in the previous six years. Although she could not name the village where she was born, she accurately described its setting on the river's edge, as well as nearby villages she remembered passing on the way to the bomb shelter. She wrote about her childhood, her mother's death, the orphanage. Her eighth-grade picture from Piedmont High was attached.

Five years passed before Ly saved enough from baby-sitting and other odd jobs to visit Vietnam. She went back with Anh and Tich, two of her DeBolt ``brothers'' who were also going to see their families for the first time.

At her native village, Ly received a hero's welcome. Her overjoyed family and fellow villagers kept her up night after night asking about her new life half a world away. They could scarcely believe how active she could be in America as a disabled person.

Ly had been through so many changes since leaving home. The village, though, looked exactly as she remembered. ``The main difference was there was no war,'' she says. ``Everything was so alive.''

It would be the first of many visits, bridges not just to the past, but also to the future.

On her second trip, she met a farmer named Thanh, and two years ago they were married. Last year, Ly gave birth to their son, Kaimi. Thanh remains in Vietnam, awaiting a U.S. visa so he can join his wife and son. An arc-shaped scar on Ly's left cheek is the only visible reminder of the airlift 20 years ago.

Ly never figured out whether the relief workers who organized the airlift knew she had family near Danang. But the city had already fallen to the Viet Cong, and with thousands of people frantically fleeing the area, there would have been no question of sending a child back.

Seventy-eight children died when the C5A went down. All had been sitting in the plane's cargo hold. According to Friends for All Children, the relief organization that brought Ly to Saigon for surgery and later to the U.S., she was one of only three children in the cargo hold to survive.

Despite two years of nonstop headaches from the crash, the nine years it took to get a settlement from Lockheed and the 12 years she was separated from her family, Ly was never bitter about being put on the plane against her wishes.

``I took it as part of life,'' she says. ``I accepted the war so well that I accepted anything else that happened to me.'' Every morning, Ly kisses Kaimi goodby, then leaves him in the care of her ``brother'' Anh. She heads off in her wheelchair for the BART ride to Longfellow Elementary School in Oakland, where she is an instructional assistant for bilingual children. In the afternoon, she's off to her job as an office assistant at the state Regional Water Quality Control Board.

Ly says she couldn't be happier with how her life turned out -- for a disabled person in Vietnam, going to work, getting married and raising children would have been virtually impossible.

She's doing what she can to change that. She and Anh have founded Ablenet, a nonprofit organization that is teaching disabled people in Vietnam to use computers so they can break with tradition and lead more independent lives.

Sitting in her Berkeley home after work one evening, with one- year-old Kaimi busily crawling all over her lap, Ly marvels at the circuitous path her life has taken in the last 20 years.

``I always feel I must have a purpose why I survived through so many things,'' she says with a smile. ``I'm not sure what it is, but I think for one person to go through so much pain and suffering, there must be a purpose.''


http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1995/04/16/SC7865.DTL&type=printable


This was all I could find...enjoy.....