Adoption Brings Family Full-Circle

Mother Goes Back To Her Birth Country To Adopt A Baby Girl

(CBS)  The baby's Vietnamese name means Gentle Water. She was just weeks old when she was abandoned - left in the garden of an orphanage near Hanoi.

Now she's got new parents in America, Tallia Hart and Mark Bodenhamer. They call her Lola, CBS News correspondent John Blackstone reports.

“We just said, infant girl - and we got you!” Hart said.

"How could you take this beautiful little girl and just send her somewhere?" Bodenhamer said.

But 33 years ago, exactly the same thing happened to Hart. At six months old, she was abandoned in a rice field - an orphan of the Vietnam War.

“I was completely malnourished - I was probably half of her size,” Hart said. “I had boils everywhere.”

The nuns at the orphanage thought she was too sick and weak to survive. But in Colorado there was a family that wanted her.

“That’s my original Vietnamese passport that I came over with,” she said, showing the old document. “My only belonging.”

She was nursed back to health, grew up and thrived. But when she thought about having her own family, she knew where it had to start.

“We just felt like that’s one of the greatest gifts you can give anyone,” she said. “The gift of opportunity and love.”

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To meet her new daughter, Hart returned to the land she left when she was just six months old.

“You know, I kind of fought back some tears when I - we - first landed, just because I’d never been there,” she said.

She wondered, of course, about her own mother who gave her up. And about Lola's mother who put her baby in a little cartoon dress and left her at the orphanage gate.

“It must have been really difficult, and I feel really bad for her,” Hart said.

She did it, Tallia is certain, to give her daughter a better life. And no mother could understand that better than Tallia does.

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Your story was very heartwarming. I too was adopted from an orphanage from a wonderful loving family in St. Louis in 1975. I cried when I saw your story on t.v. My mother and father also adopted 2 Vietnamese boys, we are not blood related, but have always had the same last Vietnamese name. Nguyen is very popular. And my parents also gave us new American names and kept our Vietnamese names for our middle names so we would always remember where we came from. We are very fortunate to be here because of my parents love for one another to want to have children.

God bless you!