Home for Christmas...67 children! American couple adopt to give Asian kids a home

Northwest Asian Weekly

01-01-1999

by Aki Yanigisawa

Bob and Linda Cornyn do not limit their spirit of giving to just this time of the year. For more than 20 years, the couple in Fife has been dedicating their lives to adopting hard-to-place children from all over the world.

The couple's "ministry," as Linda called it, began in 1978 when Bob was an Army officer, stationed in Korea. While there, a friend of Linda's, who lived in Bupyong, mentioned an orphanage that adopted out abandoned children. It shocked Bob and Linda to learn just how many infants were abandoned by their parents and left there.

In most cases, Linda explained, fathers of the infants did not wish to keep them after they were born. That in turn left mothers feeling it was impossible to nurture their infants on their own, so they took the babies to the orphanage.

"I came from a strong family with 15 children," Linda said. "My father did his best to take care of each one of us, so it's hard for me to comprehend how some men can simply walk away from the responsibility of taking care of their own children."

Soon the couple visited the orphanage. Again, they were astonished to see the large number of children who had left in a place where they didn't even know what they were going to have for dinner. The Cornyns took a 9-month-old boy home that night.

During the two and a half years they were in Korea, the couple adopted four other children.

In the next couple of decades since then, they have adopted a total of 67 children from all over the world. Currently, they are living with 35 children, whose ages vary from 21 months to 27 years. It is a place they can all call home.

People often ask her how many of her children are from Korea, Linda said; her answer is that she does not categorize her children based on their origin or nationality.