For three decades Thanh Campbell presumed he was an orphan. In 1975, Campbell was one of 57 children airlifted from a Vietnamese orphanage during the chaos of the fall of Saigon, to start new lives in Canada.
Last year Campbell, a member of Meadowlands Christian Reformed Church in Ancaster, Ontario, organized a reunion of those 57 children (see Banner, August 2006).
Media coverage of that event reached a newspaper in Vietnam and caught the attention of Nguyen Minh Thanh, who has spent much of the past 31 years searching for his lost son.
After e-mail contact, subsequent DNA testing confirmed that Thanh Campbell was indeed his missing son.
In a phone conversation Campbell’s father assured him through a translator that he had not been given up or abandoned but that it had all been a horrible mistake. “He told me, ‘We never gave up trying to find you,’” said Campbell.
Campbell plans to go to Vietnam in the coming year to meet his birth family.
“This is a testimony to what God can do. Only through his hand could all of these pieces come together,” said Campbell.
