At 7:30 am, on the chilly winter morning of 6 October 1987, a group of 72 indigenous children from the remote Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh who had been living in refugee camps in India disembarked from Air France Flight no 189 and entered Charles de Gaulle Airport. Their journey from India had been long: traveling on a chartered Indian Airlines flight from Agartala, the largest city in the Indian state of Tripura, to the Indian capital Delhi, and from there to Paris.

The publicity that preceded their arrival in France, which had included a passionate plea from the French President's wife, Danielle Mitterrand, meant that the children, who were aged between 5 and 13, were greeted by a throng of journalists, television crews and the Secretary of State for Human Rights in the French government, Claude Malhuret.

Following their life-threatening ordeal in the war zone of the CHT in Bangladesh and their impoverished internment in India, the children were set to begin a new life in the first world. But life in France was not always to be easy for the children or their foster families, nor was it easy for the organizations and individuals involved in bringing them to France, and it was certainly not easy for the families of the children left behind in South Asia.

Drawing upon historical documentation together with interviews with some of the now adult foster children, this chapter traces the background of nationalism and war that led to the flight of the 72 children from Bangladesh to India. It exposes the liability of the Bangladesh and Indian Governments in creating conditions of terror for the children, and examines the role of the French Government, French aid organizations and administrators in their not always successful attempts to provide a home for the children. It recounts some of the early experiences of the children in their new environments in France, and the differing ways the children's lives have unfolded to the present day. Ultimately the story of the children brings into sharp focus the complexities of inter-country adoption and the ambiguities of personal, cultural and national identity that result.