Hannah Bouchie (center) wears a traditional Chinese dress in red and gold, which represents good luck. Many lady bugs could be found around the classroom, the insect is the Chinese symbol for adoption. From left are Hunter, Charla, Hannah and Jim Bouchie.

What started with a first grade class discussion at Our Lady of Perpetual Help School about first flights in an airplane, led to a moving presentation about love and adoption by the Bouchie family.

Seven-year-old Hannah Bouchie told her classmates the first time she rode in an airplane was on her way to the United States from China when she was only 15 months old.

Barbara Villen, the Religious Education teacher, was fascinated by Hannah’s story and invited her parents, Charla and Jim Bouchie, into class to talk about the experience.

“Our journey started in 2002,” said Jim Bouchie. “Just like [the three wise men] we took a journey to the East to find our little baby.”

The family – minus Hannah’s older brother, Hunter, 8, who was in a different class – explained the adoption process to the students.

Charla Bouchie said the parents coincidentally started the paperwork to adopt a child from China the day before Hannah was born, and exactly 15 months later they had her in their arms.

Hannah, born Yin Qui Mei in the Hunan province of China, helped her parents tell the class about Chinese culture and traditions.

After showing a home video of a Chinese marketplace that featured baskets full of dried scorpions, beetles and centipedes, – delicacies in China – the kids were offered snacks of candy worms.

The family is a part of the Louisiana chapter of Families with Children of China, an organization that aims to provide information and a network of support for families who have adopted in China.

In 2009, there were about 3,000 children adopted from China, and as of 2006 more than 90 percent of them were girls, according to Adoptive Families Magazine.

This is likely a result of China’s population control policies, such as limiting families to one child per household, said Charla Bouchie.

Charla said Hannah was found on the doorstep of the orphanage, and that the birth mother must have cared for the baby as dropping infants off at orphanages or hospitals is illegal in China.