HARRY & BERTHA'S GRAVESITE

Today I thought I would go up and see the gravesite of Harry & Bertha Holt.  I decided now would be a good time to tell their story.  Because to tell their story, is to tell my story...

There are 59 steps leading up to the gravesite, which is a tribute to the age of Harry Holt when he died.

Harry and Bertha Holt were your average folks. Harry owned a lumber mill in Eugene, Oregon, and was a farmer. His wife Bertha was employed like many women of her time as a nurse. In December 1954, Harry and Bertha attended a meeting in which Bob Pierce, the head of the evangelical organization, World Vision, showed a documentary film about the plight of Korean children fathered and abandoned by American G.I.'s. In her book, "The Seed from the East," Bertha Holt recounts this watershed moment in their lives:

"I looked at Harry. He was motionless and tense. I knew every scene had cut him like a knife. I was hurt, too. There is so much we have never known. We had never thought of such suffering and heartbreak. We had never heard of such poverty and despair. We had never seen such emaciated arms and legs, such bloated starvation-stomachs and such wistful little faces searching for someone to care…"

Initially the Holts determined to sponsor ten Korean orphans by sending money in order to help meet some of these children's physical needs. But unbeknownst to the other, Harry and Bertha each began to experience a gnawing feeling that merely giving money was not enough and that they needed to consider moving beyond this comfortable place. She wrote, "More and more I found myself wishing we could bring some of the Korean orphans into our own home where we could love and care for them. I would walk from room to room thinking of how we could put a cot here…and another bed there. It even occurred to me that some of the rooms could be partitioned and made into two rooms without depriving anyone. In fact, some of the rooms even appeared empty as I looked at them."

On April 15, 1955, Harry finally voiced his conviction that he and his wife should adopt some of the orphans in Korea. And while both Harry and Bertha were 50-years-old at the time and already had six children: Stuart, Wanda, Molly, Barbara, Suzanne, and Linda.  They decided to add eight more children to their family. In October 1955, after receiving a special act from Congress allowing them to exceed the two child limit of the time, Harry Holt accompanied his children Betty, Christine, Helen, Joseph, Mary, Nathaniel, Paul, and Robert to their new home in Oregon.

With the Korean war 50 years behind us, finding families for orphans of war is no longer the primary objective of Korean adoption practice. Although Korean children are still placed because they have been orphaned, it is far more common for birth parents to place their children in adoption because they are unmarried, or due to financial need or family hardship. This is causing the Korean adoption community to seriously review acceptable circumstances for intercountry adoption by non-Korean parents, and to place more emphasis on increasing domestic adoption in Korea. Hopefully, Korean government officials will also work toward improving the social services that would eliminate the need for parents to place children solely out of financial need.