<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"></head><body dir="auto"><div><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"><div><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div><span></span></div><div>Courtesy of <i>CBS News' Sunday Morning</i> at:</div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/vietnam-orphans-search-for-their-roots/">http://www.cbsnews.com/news/vietnam-orphans-search-for-their-roots/</a></div><div><div><br></div><div>--------------------------------------</div><div><br></div><div><h1 class="title" itemprop="headline" style="margin: 0px 0px 20px; text-rendering: auto; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; word-spacing: -0.04em; line-height: 0.9; letter-spacing: -0.07em; font-size: 50px; font-family: nimbus-sans, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(32, 32, 34);">Vietnam orphans search for their roots</h1><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><em style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Forty years ago this month a military C5-A transport left Saigon with orphans headed for new lives in America. But a cargo door blew out, and the plane crashed. It killed 138, including 78 children.</em></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><em style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">By the time South Vietnam fell, many more Vietnamese children had left their homeland. And now, Barry Petersen tells us, some of those children, long since grown up, are coming home: </em></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"></p><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">At the memorial service, they came to remember that terrible day in that terrible war -- the crash that killed 138 people, 78 of whom were children. </span><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But more orphans were evacuated in the frantic last days. During the Vietnam War, some 3,000 orphans came to the U.S. Orphans like Tobi Snyder, who was barely six pounds when she came to America.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"I have a real love for life," she said. "And I don't know if that has anything to do with it, but I am a survivor. I am a fighter."</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">And Stacy Meredith, given up by her mother when she was two. "As a child, you just don't understand how a parent could ever let you go," she told Petersen.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Sister Mary Nelle Gage volunteered at the orphanages starting in 1973. "One of the first things that I remember seeing was one of the little children reaching out from the crib and grabbing a cockroach to play with it," she said. "And I was horrified. But this is the way it is. These are the cards that you're dealt."</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The Vietnamese say hundreds of thousands of children were orphaned by the war. Of those who came to America, some had lost their parents. Or, they were children who had American fathers that Vietnamese families didn't want.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But most babies came with no story.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"We had children who were found in the market, [left] on a bus, and then the police brought them to us," said Sister Mary Nelle. </span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">And all these decades later, the bond endures. "It wasn't just a moment in time. We're bound forever." </span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">For 20 years now, Sister Mary Nelle has been guiding orphans back to Vietnam -- and to the orphanages where they were babies.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">On this day in Loveland, Colorado, she's at a bon voyage party for Tobi -- now married with three sons, and soon on her way to Vietnam. "I've always been curious of my roots," Tobi said. "I look around and most of my friends, they know where they're born. And I've just never been able to really know that. And so this trip to Vietnam will be as close as I can get to that."</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">All she knows is that she was a two-pound infant when she arrived at the orphanage. A few pieces of paper and a photo contain all the information she has about her beginnings.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Petersen asked, "What emotions do you have when you look at this? This is you."</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"Yeah, I think it's just amazing and astonishing that any of us survived. I guess quite a few of us passed on." </span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Stacy Meredith also survived, but was haunted by not knowing her birth mother, or why she was dropped off at an orphanage as a toddler.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Her 19-year-old mother gave sparse details -- her name, that Stacy's father was an American soldier, that her family came from the Can Tho region in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. But not why she gave up Stacy. "So, there's a part of it that still hurts," she told Petersen. "And I miss her. I miss her terribly."</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"Explain that to me: How do you miss someone that you certainly couldn't even remember?"</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"I miss the idea of having her in my life," said Stacy. "The fact that she kept me for a couple years before she gave me up, to me, tells me that she loved me very much, and she tried. She did what she could."</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">It's a long trip back to Vietnam -- not just the hours on a plane, but the trip back in time.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), Sister Mary Nelle takes Tobi to her orphanage. It is still operating, still a place for abandoned babies.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"How do you feel when you see these babies and this is where you came from?" Petersen asked Tobi. </span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"Just very amazed and humbled," she replied. "And I can't believe that this could be the very room that I was nourished in." </span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Perhaps only a child who never knew her birth parents or even her homeland can understand how important this moment is -- finding at least this much of her beginnings. </span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"I can't put words to it. Can't believe that," said Tobi. </span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"This is where you came from," Petersen said.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"It is. My life started here because of people who cared so much. And they had hope for us."</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But for Stacy, the journey might be more revealing -- and come with more answers.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In Ho Chi Minh City, she connects with a Vietnamese TV network, together with a man who's been tracking down the families of orphans -- and discovers they may have located hers.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"I'm scared that it's not them," said Stacy. "I'm scared of getting my heart broken." </span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">To meet them, she and her husband, Peter, travel to Can Tho, 100 miles to the south. The possible relatives stand ready to welcome this American woman into their home.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But what might be the best of news, is also the worst. If this is the right family, then Ngo Thi Diep (who may be her mother) died of cancer.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Stacy has a great likeness to her mother, says Uncle Hai.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Her aunt said her mother always missed her, that she tried all her life to find her.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Through a translator, and through tears, Stacy said, "Please tell them that I'm sorry that I was too late to meet her."</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Later, Stacy told Petersen, "I know I didn't look like it, but it made me extremely happy to know that. I got a lot of answers at that moment." </span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Like what? "That she loved me, that she thought of me. That I wasn't just an accident. I wasn't an inconvenience."</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But there is still one big IF - if this is really her family. Stacy takes DNA samples from Uncle Hai and a man who may be her half-brother. It takes two weeks to get the answer: The DNA is a match. </span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"Uncle Hai, and my brother, are very, very close matches," said Stacy. </span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"I think you have a family in Vietnam, Stacy," said Petersen. </span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">She paused. "Wow ..."</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">It's a moment she's been dreaming of for 40 years. </span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In Vietnam she went to the grave of the woman she now knows is her mother. "They could not emphasize enough to me how tough her life was, Her heart ached for me after I was gone, and how she continued to search for me."</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">At the gravesite of Ngo Thi Diep, Stacy said through tears, "Please, can somebody please tell them 'thank you' for being here, and welcoming me into their family." </span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">It took 40 years to complete a journey that started in a war, and led to a new life -- and ended back where it all began, where Stacy could finally tell her mother what that little girl sent to America always wanted to say: "Mom, I love you."</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">--------------------</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><img src="cid:90684199-FE3F-40BA-BF40-94A9C417A0D3" alt="image1.jpeg" id="90684199-FE3F-40BA-BF40-94A9C417A0D3"></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Video of the Sunday Morning segment:</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><a href="http://youtu.be/_iAWUliBy3E">http://youtu.be/_iAWUliBy3E</a></span></p></div><div>--------------------------------------<br><br><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Seeya 'round town, Moscow, because . . .</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"Moscow Cares"</span></div><div><a href="http://www.moscowcares.com/" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><font color="#000000">http://www.MoscowCares.com</font></a></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span></div><div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Tom Hansen</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Moscow, Idaho</span></div></div><div><br></div></div></div></div></div></body></html>