A pair of twins who were adopted by separate families as babies got married without knowing they were brother and sister, a peer told the House of Lords.

A court annulled the British couple’s union after they discovered their true relationship, Lord Alton said.

The peer – who was told of the case by a High Court judge involved – said the twins felt an “inevitable attraction”.

He said the case showed how important it was for children to be able to find out about their biological parents.

Details of the identities of the twins involved have been kept secret, but Lord Alton said the pair did not realise they were related until after their marriage.

‘Truth will out’

The former Liberal Democrat MP raised the couple’s case during a House of Lords debate on the Human Fertility and Embryology Bill in December.

“They were never told that they were twins,” he told the Lords.

“They met later in life and felt an inevitable attraction, and the judge had to deal with the consequences of the marriage that they entered into and all the issues of their separation.”

He told the BBC News website that their story raises the wider issue of the importance of strengthening the rights of children to know the identities of their biological parents.

“If you start trying to conceal someone’s identity, sooner or later the truth will out,” he said.

“And if you don’t know you are biologically related to someone, you may become attracted to them and tragedies like this may occur.”

Pam Hodgkins, chief executive officer of the charity Adults Affected by Adoption (NORCAP) said there had been previous cases of separated siblings being attracted to each other.

“We have a resistance, a very strong incest taboo where we are aware that someone is a biological relative,” she said.

“But when we are unaware of that relationship, we are naturally drawn to people who are quite similar to ourselves.

‘Incredibly rare’

“And of course there is unlikely to be anyone more similar to any individual than their sibling.”

Mo O’Reilly, director of child placement for the British Association for Adoption and Fostering, said the situation was traumatic for the people involved, but incredibly rare.

“Thirty or 40 years ago it would have been more likely that twins be separated and, brought up without knowledge of each other,” she said.

Today, however, adopted children grow up with a greater knowledge of their birth families – and organisations try to place brothers and sisters together.

If that were not possible, the siblings would still have some form of contact with each other.

“This sad case illustrates why, over the last 20-30 years, the shift to openness in adoption was so important,” Ms O’Reilly added.

Read the original article here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7182817.stm

This is a story about my life. It is a story about identity, culture, belonging and families. To me, for the most part it is a story about Home. Making one, finding more, leaving many and taking them with you when you go.

I was born in Vietnam, during a time of war, and then adopted to an Australian family. Five years ago, I returned to the place of my birth. It has taken until now to be able to find the words, write them down and and speak of the experience. In the intervening years, I decided to hide away the events of my visit to my birth place. I wanted them kept safe from analytical tinkering, uninvited interference, wacky conclusions or undisciplined thoughts. Let the past be done with, I declared. I concluded that there were more important things to attend to, to think and speak about. And I was right.

But during this time, when I was keeping the stories of Vietnam at a distance, I was also experiencing a disconnection in relating with other people. I would have the occasional meetings and I was competent, I thought, at listening, but I could not answer questions. Simple, easy, demographic questions regarding my life began to take avery long time to answer and when I did manage to reply, I stuttered and mumbled incoherently. Questions like: What is your name? Where do you come from? Where do you live? Where is your home? Where were you born? Embedded within these enquiries is a request to disclose what nationality you are, what country is your country, what language do you speak. Other questions would inevitably follow: Who are you parents? How many brothers and sisters do you have? What is your profession? Are you single, married, divorced? These seemingly simple questions are routinely asked in conversation or on forms with little boxes to indicate which simple category you belong within. Those little spaces imply that the answers to those questions are to be easy and brief. But that is not possible for all of us. Anticipating the inevitable sense of awkwardness that would accompany these sorts of questions led me me to avoid talking to people as much as possible.

ed what my Vietnamese family had intended or thought about when choosing this name for me. Feeling that I had been granted a name representative of a particular meaning, image or metaphor, evoked a soft appreciation for the people responsible and a new sense of substance began to surround my anonymous biological parentage. It was around the time I learnt the meaning of my Vietnamese name, that I began a journey on which I would meet the ‘I’ that I may have been, an ‘I’ whom I definitely wasnot, and more importantly the ‘I’ that I could possibly become.

WHY VIETNAM?
In 2002, I traveled to Vietnam to visit my country of birth and to see Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, where my life began. I had always presumed that when the time was right, I would one day return. There were times in my life when I did not think much about going back to Vietnam. I had phases when I assumed a revisit would be an exciting adventure to pursue. And then, sometimes exploring the unknown felt a little daunting. For the most part though, there were simply other concerns, projects and life happenings to be focusing on. It was only a matter of when the ‘right time’ would arise, Vietnam wasn’t going anywhere.

There were many reasons why 2002 became the right time to go. My marriage had ended, I was overwhelmed and disillusioned by my shortcomings and my confusions. What had up until then made sense, all of sudden didn’t.

I went to Vietnam to discover what the experience of returning would be like. Questions of identity, nationhood, culture and family accompanied my collection of guidebooks and Vietnamese language tapes. What was the relationship between my birth country and my identity? And more poignantly, what forces would dictate the shape, form and experience of this relationship? What part would be played by the deep-rooted socio-cultural assumption, that who we are and subsequently who we are related to, is inherently dependent upon the ethnicity with which we are born? This commonly held belief has provided frustration, annoyance as well as occasional insight to my experiences, to my life.

What if I journeyed to Vietnam and felt no affiliation? Was my connection with Vietnam the country, only an affiliation by biological design? I was not sure what feared or excited me more, the consideration that travelling to Vietnam would ‘complete me’ – thus inadvertently debunking my prior claims of Australian nationality and familial belonging; or the possibility of experiencing Vietnam as a country merely to be a tourist in, to visit, appreciate, compare and contrast, and then exit merely with cherished, abeit impersonal memories.

How would it physically feel like to be in Vietnam? How would Vietnamese people regard me and respond to me? How would this affect the already tenuous albeit well considered sense of identity I was accustomed to living with?

There was also the question of my Vietnamese family, whom I had come to refer to as my birth or biological family – the invisible denominator of my familial equation. My Australian parents and I had been given the information at the time of my adoption that any documents were unreliable due to the chaotic and controversial circumstances of the war in Vietnam. The identity I came with from Vietnam was potentially suspect. Perhaps I was not born Lai Luu after all. And yet, the birth documents that accompanied me as a small baby were considered good enough by my parents, and more than sufficient by me.

I was raised with the story that my birth mother took me to the orphanage because the circumstances of war meant she was unable to look after me. This was, I grew up accepting, an act of love. My parents clearly articulated that it was them who were the ‘lucky ones’, and communicated a feeling of immense gratitude towards my birth family. My mother would tell me that she felt entrusted with the role of parenting me, one that she considered an important responsibility. My parents gave to me the best of themselves and words here could never do justice to articulating the love I have for them. I believe that the care my parents took to formulate
a story of love surrounding my early life has enabledme to discern and then disregard the less enhancing stories that we who have been adopted can sometimes identify with. Most importantly, I know that any act of thoughtfulness or gesture of generosity I extend, can be directly traced back in time to them. There is no question as to whom my parents of origin are.

From a poststructuralist perspective, many aspects of life contribute to how we know and experience ourselves, as well as those in our lives. It seems important to mention some of the socio-political influences that shape the stories of my life. I was born and then adopted from Vietnam during a time of war and contentious conflict. Bring born of that time, in that place, my identity will in some ways always be entangled and imbedded within that war.

There was a supposition that my ‘birth father’ was not Vietnamese, that he had ‘probably’ been a soldier in the war from a country outside Vietnam. A loosely hypothesized caricature of my birth mother was that she was young and economically poor. These assumptions I held in reference to my parentage, now seem examples of cultural and political impressionism. In hindsight, it would seem that the unknown details of my early life were sketched in through the lens of a romanticised North American block buster epic saga. Growing up, this story appealed quite nicely to my imaginations of grandeur. Together with the stipulation that was given to my parents upon my adoption that I was never to return to Vietnam, I remember as a child feeling quite clandestinely exotic. I had been banished!

I also remember feeling sickeningly stricken if I had to witness any dramatised scenes of war, or actual footage of war. I still find this to be totally unbearable, as I am sure many other people do. But how was I to make sense of these experiences? And what would this all mean when I returned to my birth country?

Before leaving Australia, I tried to anticipate how I would think of my biological family whilst in Vietnam. It was supposed by others that I would possibly perceive all passer–byes as potential relatives. I had, however, never done this before and randomly hypothesising genetic connection with every person I saw sounded a little manic! I did imagine that in Vietnam I would engage in a new way of reflecting about my birth family. Although what form that was to take, I had no idea.

I did not go with an intention of locating any familial ties or familial history. Instead, despite the forewarned suspectability of my documents, I was excited by the thought of visiting the hospital that was named on my birth certificate and the orphanage I had been taken to as an infant. Before leaving Australia, the realms of discovery I intended to seek out were these physical landmarks of my history.

Having been born in Vietnam, then adopted and raised in Australia, has been a defining aspect of who I am in the world. And it is with stubborn pride that I have felt continuously compelled to circumvent the presumptions that I must want to know about my birth family, that I should want to go to Vietnam.

Now, though, I had decided to re-visit Vietnam, and I supposed that somewhere along the way the ‘I’ I was acquainted with, was going to be changed, tumbled and transformed. And how, I asked myself, amidst all this existential wrangling, could I avoid being too damned precious about it all?! With, I guessed; an open heart, an open mind and the idea that possibily this was not only all about me. That maybe this was also about my multiple families and about a collective journey of enquiry regarding what it is that we know about culture, race, family, belonging and identity.

NEW GROUND

I loved being in Vietnam, unwrapping it slowly one peep at a time. I journeyed up from the south to the north and back again – Hanoi, Hue, Nhatrang, Nui dat, Dalat, Saigon. My vantage point would shift, sometimes traveller sometimes local dweller. I would move in and out of each role, as if I was wearing character camouflage, that is, as long as I didn’t open my mouth to speak! There were times when people would pass by and I would merely smile and the assumptiom would be that I belonged. It was a totalistic, conventional, look- like-everybody, inherited family features way of belonging. Of course, this version of experience with the outside world was entirely in my head as the passers-by were a great deal more focused upon their own lives. Regardless, I richly appreciated this novel experience.

In some respects it was like reaching my promised land. I was enchanted by Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, the place of my birth. I felt totally indulged, as each moment overflowed with activities to witness. The constant streams of traffic, the cooking aromas of sidewalk stalls and the Vietnamese people, whose gene pool – whether I felt it or not – I was connected to. For those first
few days, I would sit staring out of my hotel window while slowly sipping bowls of soup. This floor-to-ceiling glass peep-hole was giving me access to a whole new world: a world that I had grown up hearing about, talking about and hypothesising over.

I was mesmerised by the passers-by, older people, children, adolescents, babies and the women. The Vietnamese women with long flowing aoe-ais, the traditional dress of long pants and mandarin collared neck-to-thigh shirts. I was fascinated by her many guises: long hair, short hair, walking with children, riding motorbikes, cycling through literally hundreds of bicycles. I was fascinated with her elegance, her life, her everydayness, her humour, her strength, her language and her contradictions. This infatuation
with the Vietnamese woman alluded to so many imaginative wonderings – of what may have been, of whom I may have been – if what did happen hadn’t happened. Possibly somewhat narcissistic, I transposed a possible ‘my life’ upon snippets of others.

It felt experimental to taste a sense of sameness based on ethnicity. It is such a persuasive commonality. I know well the experience of feeling defined by elements of difference, of being designated to a realm of ‘other’. And in this experience I have known both freedom and frustration. To blend in anonymously, on the other hand, was totally new. For me, being the same as others around me was exotic. Being amongst people of the same ethnic background brought a unique flavor of liberation.

There is a well researched popularised notion, borne from western psychology, of the advantages of growing up around those to whom one is similar. According to it, an esteemed proviso to healthy adulthood is to be provided with well positioned footsteps to seamlessly fill. But this view of identity formation has its flipside. Where the criteria of sameness is unavailable, presumptions of detrimental consequences are cast. Where life circumstances do not contain ‘same as’ parenting and prescribed normative environments, deductive identity conclusions can be fertilised and upheld for those of us for whom there are no obvious footsteps. And anyway, does being a part of a majority consensus only provide a healthy degree of self acceptance? Or can it also diminish possibilities of reinvention and lead to underestimating unique idiosyncrasies? What becomes possible to see and to contribute when your identity is formed outside the mainstream?

DON’T GET LIPSTICK ON ME

My little five year old toes curl tightly around the rim of the top of the bath. My fingertips only
just reach the edge of the hand basin to hold my balance, preventing me from toppling onto the hard tiles in front of me or worse, falling bottom first into the empty hard surface of the bath behind me. Standing at this level I am able to see mummy’s reflection as well as my own – from the nose up that is. I love watching her make-up ritual. She makes funny faces for lipstick, and I laugh out loud when she closes one eye at a time for eye colour. I think this make-up wearing takes lots of practice. My toes hurt from gripping the bath top, but it’s the only way I can see and anyway, it’s worth it. When she’s done she always gives me a big kiss with her lipstick on, just so I can get some too. I reckon my mum’s really beautiful.

When I was a young girl growing up, I looked at those around me, and perhaps there was not the likeness in physicality, but never-the-less I had much to model life on.

DELIGHTS TO REPLACE DILEMMAS

An unanticipated surprise which amused and delighted me was just how much I enjoyed telling
people in Vietnam about my Vietnamese origins. The details of my history and my ancestral
background seemed to inspire a socially mediated entitlement, an assumed authentic claim to national membership. This was in clear contrast to how my claims to being Australian have so often been disputed, questioned or problematic.

My declaration of Vietnamese ancestry, and origin of birth, awarded me a social acceptance on a basis of physicality and citizenship that I was unaccustomed to receiving. While my inability to understand and speak Vietnamese sometimes brought my credibility into question, the responses I received when I explained why this was so, in account of my adopted family home, endeared me most to the Vietnamese community. Their responses also tenderly applied a healing balm to some of my longest held grazes and scrapes.

Over the years in Australia, when disclosing my adopted-from-Vietnam status, I have received mixed reactions. I believe that these reactions have reflected the socio-culturally available assumptions and paradigms within Australian culture rather than the particular individual’s disposition. Regarding issues of nationality and family, I have been a recipient of comments and reactions of thoughtfulness, kindness and acceptance, as well as those of pity, ignorance and condescension. I know that people have not intended to smite or hurt or confuse. What was startling, however, was that the responses I received in Vietnam were so different than those I receive in Australia. While it may seem unkind to highlight inter-relational comparisons between cultures, the contrast has been unexpected and revealing.

Vietnamese people whom I met were very gentle and kind to me, displaying a sincere and non- imposing curiosity in regards to where I had come from and why I was there. In hearing of my history, rather than expressions of pity, people conveyed a measured compassion, and rather than being considered ‘lucky’ (which those in Australia often said), Vietnamese people expressed feeling pleased for me that I was able to return to Vietnam and were respectful of the layers of meaning this could hold. I was heartened to be a part of relational exchanges in which seemingly mutually exclusive considerations could be evenly conveyed.

The circumstances surrounding my origins of life have brought great fortune to me in many ways worthy of celebration. They have also contained unnamed losses – undoubtedly compensated, but worthy of lament none-the-less. Somehow, in sharing the stories of my life with those in Vietnam, all these nuances could be honoured. This unique experience of social acceptance which was offered to me seemed grounded somehow in Vietnamese social, historical and cultural ways of making meaning of complex circumstances. I am appreciative of witnessing such a richly intricate expression of culture and I will always feel indebted to those who responded to me and my stories in such reverent and thoughtful ways.

KITCHEN KINSWOMEN

I am sitting in a kitchen, bathing in the surrounds of my ‘native tongue’. Fantastic women, energetically busy, working, laughing and teasing. I grin conspiringly,comprehending non-linguistics only. I feel like a young inconspicous child, sneaking in on the grown up conversation. In Vietnam, I regress to learning by mimmicking. In this way, I aquire new ways of eating, of grooming and of caring for one another.

‘Ga’, a young woman says to me, pointing to the fish. ‘Ga’, I repeat in scholarly parrot fashion. They nod their approval of my rudimentary grasp of an obvious and basic term. And then laugh with bellies dancing, or giggle behind shyly positioned hands and lightfilled eyes. I decide to take my turn to serve another, and who knows, most probably deface a particularly exulted tradition at the same time. They kindly excuse my ignorance with yet another round of toothy grins and emphatically indicate to me a position at their table, for any time, reserved for me. This gesture of inclusive generosity breaks my heart. I am at loss for words that I am incapable of saying.

Vietnamese people I spoke with tended to underestimate the challenge I would have in learning the language or preparing finicky culinary garnishes. It was as if they believed the genetic staín would quickly bleed through to influence and inform my eating habits, linguistic acquisition and scooter riding ability. It didn’t, by the way, all attempts resulted in monumental room for improvement.

‘I think’, they would say with conviction, ‘It will be easy for you.’ During my time in Vietnam, there were things that were easy, and there were things that weren’t.

In leaving Adelaide, I had decided to experience Vietnam in solitude. The physical absence of family and friends to authenticate familiar and practiced ideas of who I was, as well as who I once used to be, felt liberating and enlightening. Being separate from the grounding force of loved ones and known landscapes, it was left to me to discover or invent practices and processes to uphold a sense of stability. At times this left me strained and unsure.

Unsurprisingly, when I felt physically exhausted, far from familiar comforts, occasionally I found
myself in a fraught, fragile state. Oh how I well remember these moments, not merely for their ‘woe betide’ value, but also because in any and all of those times of bleak airlessness; a thought, a person or an event would somehow arise to transform and transcend the situation. This occurred time and again in such unpredictable and wayward fashion that even at my most imaginative moments, I couldn’t possibly have made them up.

It was during one of those murky moody grey mornings that I found myself sitting downstairs in the foyer entrance of the guesthouse, slurping away at a bowl of noodle soup. I felt truly miserable, when grace flew in on a Boeing 747 from Newcastle, Australia, in the form of Charlie and Rosemary and their sons Lawson and Eddie. Their down-to-earth generosity and accents heavily laden with Australian euphemisms wrapped me up in a national familiarity and scooted me into the back of a taxi. Apparently this was not the time for self piteous moping, not for an Australian far from home. On the last weekend of September, there was only one place to be, amongst other Australians far from home watching the Australian Football League grand final.

HEARING AUSTRALIA CALLING

Standing up in a crowded bar, in front of a huge screen telecasting the Melbourne match, I am actually singing the parts I remember of the Australian anthem. What’smore, I am still recovering from having tearfully completed a rousing rendition of Waltzing Matilda. This, I admit, is an occurance I would have felt self-conscious, or possibly unmoved to join with on Australian soil.

They call themselves and each other ‘expats’, men who were born in Australia, men who were once soldiers, who have chosen to revisit or live permanently in Saigon. They speak of many shades of experience, unfolding and unravelling as they seek out insight of the paths they crossed, for who they are and where they feel they belong. Flickers of unspoken torments, as well as recently discovered delights, reveal themselves in tearful eyes, averted gazes and wistful smiles. I am slightly overwhelmed by their candid sharing, but mostly moved by the knowledge that there are many to whom Vietnam is a place of personal discovery and resolve.

NEW CONSIDERATIONS

I bow my head in respect. ‘Mama’, a round faced, heavy-set woman links my arm and pulls me closer to her. The grave site is situated at the back of a Buddhist temple. A temple housing ornate, large carvings of remarkably life-like deities. The smoke from the incense sticks we had minutes ago burnt is still finding its way to the headstone that we had come to pay our respects to.

Although Mama’s daughters had been gone for some time, their presence and importance in Mama’s life would always be upheld. She lays down the bouquet of flowers she has been carrying and tells my why she is there, ‘A mothers heart is large, it does not forget, it is universal for mothers everywhere’.

As I mentioned earlier, I did not go to Vietnam to look for family, nor was this something I considered possible. Upon my arrival and subsequent conversations with local people, however, anecdotes of family being sought out and reuniting after years of separation were reported as common day occurances and possible feats. In light of this, I contemplated whether this was something I wished to do proactively. I decided it wasn’t. It felt like an emotional risk and an ethical dilemma. If I was to open that journey what responsibilities would I have? And was I ready for them?

I was concerned that my values and lens of living would clash with another, that I would disappoint and hurt other people, and that I could be hurt and disappointed. A mother and/or a father of thirty years ago, if still living, may not have the space for my re-introduction to their lives. I was wary of such a potentially destructive course. I had also just said goodbye in Adelaide to my family who loved me very much, but who were saddened by my departure and unsettled by the direction my life had taken. More poignantly I had just said goodbye to my former partner, as well as to his family whom I had embraced as my own. I knew only too well the degree to which one person’s actions and omissions can influence and affect
those around them.

In addition, the idea of finding another mum and dad when you already have a mum and dad, felt unnerving to me. I remember concluding that if a re-union transpired then I would embrace it, however, at that time I chose not to pursue it.

FINDING FAMILY

Two days before I planned to leave Vietnam I met my Vietnamese family. Through uncanny and unpredictable happenings the people to whom I was connected to genetically re-entered my life, as I did theirs.

The most commonly asked question regarding this is: What was it like to meet your mother? My Vietnamese mother has always had an entity. Her absence and my existence formed the perimeters of our relationship. She has always existed in my awareness. She was the woman whose body my life was born from. Our physical meeting did not begin our relationship, rather it merely altered it.

And then again the question is asked: What was it like to meet your mother?

My recollections do not stay with me in chronological order. Perhaps this event is more like
a three dimensional mosaic of moments, impressions, thoughts and emotions. These modes are vivid and blurred, erratic and surreal.

ONE MOMENT

Saigon, somewhere. Riding on the back of a motorbike. So many bikes, so much pollution and noise. Across bridges and around residential, industrial and retail occupied corners being driven at tumultuous speed. I have no locational knowledge of where I am or where I am going to. Although I do know. An address retrieved under three decades of records, a serendipitous recovery. Motor cars travel close enough to touch me, bikes whip past in a hazardous flow. Seated behind the driver, there is not alot of space on the back of the bike. My only safety from falling off is gained by gripping onto the steel bar behind me. Hang on … just hang on.

I am merely a passenger, not only on the bike but in the events unfolding. My breathing is shallow, my pulse disturbingly detectable. This is dreamlike. Two distinct perspectives transpire simultaneously. I am both participant and witness.

AN IMPRESSION

Where I stand, unfamiliar housing surrounds me. It is hot, humid and the staín of motor pollution and exhaust is gritty and palpable. The man who had chauffered me to this moment I had only met the day before. A good man, with a love of colourful shirts. A motorbike taxi driver by profession, excitable and well meaning – but a stranger.

I can sense something of significance is approaching. A feeling of knowing, as if on a sunfilled day you know in a short, rationally impossible moment, that rain will be coming. Not a cerebral knowledge based on facts, figures and evidential proof. This knowledge arrives to consciousness via the body. I have found this knowing to be incontestable … as was the case here.

A REPEATING RELENTLESS RECOLLECTION

Voices speaking in Vietnamese, rising, falling, questioning, responding. A door opens. My internal dialogue cranks up to manic proportion.

‘Well aren´t you gonna say hello to your mama?’

I cannot succinctly tell you how I felt then, just as it is impossible to say with clarity how I feel about all of this now. What was that injury on impact? I was terrified, unprepared and overwhelmed. Terrified of what? The impossible had happened. The proverbial needle in a haystack found. I was not immaculately conceived after all. I was not this little person from nowhere, with no history. In fact, now it was readily apparent that this was not the case. I came from here. And in that initial moment, there was only shock, disillusionment and disturbance.

It is disconcerting for me to attempt to interpret or even recollect my mother’s reaction and to tell of what her experience was. I do not trust my interpretation of her expression, how she appeared to me, or what I was concluding in that moment. With the graciousness of retrospect, I have considered both of our responses to be an expression of many things. Clearly my presence evoked a wash of insurmountable considerations and memories for my mother. She and I had stepped abruptly into a moment of overwhelming complexity.

ALL THE ANSWERS TO ALL THE QUESTIONS

Seated in small plastic chairs around a lopsided plastic table are an unusual, interesting collection of people. In relationship to me there is a man I had met the day before who rode a taxi bike for a living. And there is another man I had met fifteen minutes earlier whom had stopped whilst driving by and I can only assume had knowledge of where these people lived. He has taken up a role as co-translator with the taxi driver. Then there is my mother, my sister and three young children, my nieces and my nephew.

I have a sense of time having stopped and of life having substantially transformed. In some ways it has. But in some ways it hasn’t. The cacophony of horns sounding from the main road continue and the half naked chubby toddler reaches for his mum, evoking appreciative smiles from us all.

During this event, there was an accompanying monologue running in my mind. ‘Ahh’, it remarks, ‘So this is what it’s like.’ The reunion with biological mother scene. The movie or ‘life as a play’ metaphor lent itself to assist me to digest what was unfolding.

My sensations and emotions were elevated to a hyperaroused state not previously known. A quiet mantra hummed throughout the day, which I am ridiculously certain kept me from spontaneously combusting. With even tones of humour and calm it repeated: ‘This is just a story… it’s all merely stories.’

I think of my two sisters. My soft speaking, beautiful sisters and I do wish to know them better and have them as part of my life, somehow, sometime. I met them once more after our initial meeting and the second time I was able to ask, with the help of an interpreter, if it was alright that I was there. They looked at each other and shyly smiled, nodding, ‘Yes.’ I grinned back and we chuckled in slight relief. Everything was alright.

FAREWELL FAMILY

I never got to meet my biological father, he had died three years before I journeyed to Vietnam.
I know he refurbished and sold antique furniture. My surname on my birth certificate is the same as my birth mother’s last name. Under the title of ‘Father’ is written ‘unknown’ which I suppose contributed to some of the assumptions made
surrounding my paternal background.

It was explained to me that sometimes in Vietnamese families, children are given the mother’s last name as well as their father’s. In my situation, however, I found that my father’s name was omitted from records in order for him to escape being enlisted into the armed forces. My birth father was a Buddhist devotee and in accordance to his faith, and possibly his family circumstance, it appears he was a conscientious objector. I would have liked to have met him.

After being in Vietnam, I thought that no other event could ever compare in intensity and influence upon my world. I was mistaken. A month after meeting my Vietnamese family, my father, Poppy,
died. His death stripped away perspectives and modes of living that were no longer of use. It has
been a challenging process to learn to live life without his earthly presence. I feel immensely proud and grateful to have been his daughter and I plan to always draw upon the fairylit toolkit of recollections he left behind.

MONDAY TO FRIDAY FROM YEARS ONE TILL FIVE

On the way to pick my Dad up from work, my Mum takes me to feed the kangaroos. Strange really that there are kangaroos near the factory site, but there they are anyway. We feed the kangaroos and avoid the intimidating stare of the emus up until knock off time. I know that 3.30pm is ‘knock off’ time. We stand at the gates waiting. These moments before the signal, are almost too much to bear in anticipation.

‘It’s him’. And I start running, really fast, my arms swinging quickly to help me reach him sooner. The space between us disappears and there he is. My Dad – and like he did yesterday and the day before, and the day before that, he lifts me up, gives me a big kiss and carries me all the way back to the car.

AFTER VIETNAM

At first, I found integrating the new developments of my story difficult. I felt clumsy in the designated script of where it was I came from, who it was I belonged to and to whom and how I would share my stories. It was strange to me to have my family of origin in Australia enquire after my family in Vietnam, asking me ‘tell us about your family’. At the time I was suspicious that these phrasings implied a level of distance, perhaps it was something that had always been there and I just hadn’t previously been aware. Did, in fact, my adoptive family consider me to be like an overseas student, and they were my host family of thirty years? Had my insistance of us being considered a ‘real and authentic’ family been ill informed? It was a confusing time. People asked after my mother, when my mother was in the room. My mother asked me about my mother. It possibly exacerbated the situation to be negotiating family connections in thewake of Poppy’s funeral. It was a time when sensitivities were heightened and foundations were cracked.

Looking back, I can appreciate how bumpy it was always going to be to find a good fit for the new additions to my identity construct. Despite early suspicions, meeting my birth family has not altered my relationship to my adoptive family. We still continue to frustrate, support and amuse each other. Our relationships change continually, and are always in flux, a true determinant of a ‘real family’.

There are many people with unconventional family arrangements who would probably appreciate the wobbly process involved in mediating loyalties, misunderstandings and relational ambiguitites. No doubt people find creative ways to reconcile and celebrate unprecedented family transformations every day of the week. I am struck by the ingenuity of this. I hope to discover more ways of constantly re-making family, in order to complicate it less and revere the process more.

It has been my experience that when your family life differs from an actual or imagined notion of what is considered normal or average, then these norms can influence who you understand yourself to be and what your life and family means. Biological familial ties are commonly granted normative, esteemed status and therefore all other sorts of families may be viewed as less than. This is not the case in all communities and subcultures, where children are raised by many people, and where responsibility is shared. Nor is it the case in instances where different relational ties are privileged and celebrated as much as blood ties. It has been helpful for me to explore the assumptions different cultures make about various familial arrangements. Somehow it lessens the pressure of normative judgment.

Still, I feel protective of how I regard my families. In regards to my family in Vietnam, I think of them in various ways – sometimes with detached curiosity and soft fondness as to their well being. Sometimes with lament, and wonderings as to when, if, or how, I will meet them again. No doubt, the ways in which I think of them, and the ways in which they think of me, will continue to change. One clear positive effect that my journey to Vietnam provided has been in providing me with a more congruent social script. I can say that I grew up in Australia and yes, I have been to Vietnam. I can respond to enquiry saying that yes I have family in Vietnam and yes also in Australia. And a valuable lesson I have learnt has been to embrace an entitlement to choose just how much, or just how little, I speak of such things.

WHAT NOW

Returning to Vietnam, and meeting my Vietnamese family has altered how I experience life
in both subtle and distinct ways. Who we know ourselves to be is negotiated and constructed by so many thoughts, people, times and contexts. Some of the changes can have you fall at your knees.

I turned twenty-nine in northern India. It was the first year I celebrated the occasion of my birth with knowledge and familiarity of the people to whom I had been borne to. I had new knowledge of the site where I was born and the country in which I began my life. I knew that I was born at 7.50 am, weighing in at 4 pounds and apparently I was a good baby. For the first time I knew my birth story.

It was also the first year I celebrated the occasion of my birth without Poppy’s cheerful birthday greetings either in person or over the phone. There was no beautifully mum-made card, with lovingly written messages of well-wishes, undersigned ‘Love Mum and Dad’. I could not expect my annual birthday hug, a shake of his head in disbelief of the passing years and a ‘Happy Birthday Sweetheart’. Not this year, not again. I felt a yearning, that day, for all things lost and gone. I missed my father very much.

During the years following my time in Vietnam, my finest frustration was my inability to be able to hold and articulate many things at the same time. I felt a yearning to share my adventures with those I cared about, but the challenge of expressing paradoxical sentiments, combined with a want to be understood, felt too great and left me silent. I so wanted to be able to communicate the positive aspect of an event, andto express an element of doubt or aversion in the same instance.

I so wanted to find meaningful and constructive ways to learn from grief, pain and injustice – despite how frightening and unattractive they could be. Perhaps an engagement with paradoxical sentiments is required in order to reveal the sort of strength which can be sustaining in the long term. I don’t yet know how to do this but undoubtedly there is time to learn.

I have pondered many things! How can I honour my relationship with my mother in Australia and my birth mother? How can I celebrate the anniversary of my union with family at Sydney airport as well as my birthday? How do I ever say goodbye to family – family of marriage or family of choice? How do I respect unmourned grievances surrounding what I never knew, or the grievances of ambiguous loyalties of family members who never knew me? And how does one bury a cherished marriage and make meaning of a sad divorce?

Fortunately, as these questions wash through me, Poppy’s voice can be heard. He always speaks louder as my wonderings get trickier and trickier, ‘Perhaps a good place to start is to do so carefully, slowly, one day at a time, and not alone’.

Thankfully I have come to appreciate that there are always dishes to be done, food to be prepared or people to help. And what’s more, these activities drop me out of my head and back onto my feet again.

ALWAYS ASSISTED

It has taken over five years to feel able to write these stories. At times I have wondered if it could have happened sooner had I consulted with a thoughtful guide, be it a therapist or friend or both. Why I didn’t seek out direct assistance in juggling these experiences can only be guessed at. Perhaps I sensed that the journey I have been taking is in territory not well known to others.

Even though I did not turn to others for conversation, over the last few years there have been many wise people whom I have conjured to mind, to borrow their wisdom and their belief when I was finding none of my own. I am thankful so very much to all those whose voices accompanied me along the way. These evocations reminded me that whatever I was ‘trudging through’ would one day bring new understanding; that although I may now be disconnected from resolve that in time it would return; and that one day I might be able to share my experiences of all of this in a way that could make some contribution to the lives of others.

THE WORDS PICTURES SPEAK

There was a moment in my reunion that haunted me for some time, a moment where my world came unstuck.

It was sad and beautiful and perfect.

It was as if in one instance I had gained so much, but that at the same time had as much taken away. It took a while to sift through all that was occurring in this moment. It felt like past, present and future caved in at once. I felt positioned at the centre of an intersection where countless people had crossed and intertwined. I had a sense of feeling engulfed by the enormity of how connected people can be, unknowingly strung together, even if they had never met, even if they lived in totally different worlds. The reverberations from that moment are continuing. I felt miniscule, formless and yet connected, all at once.

HOME

There are many themes which have weaved through these writings. An over arching theme is one of Home. Making one, leaving many, discovering some and taking them with you when you go. What is home? Perhaps it is a metaphor to communícate a relationship of belonging, often associated to people and places. It is not only tangible, but also linked to physical, emotional and sensory states. Home is timeless and transient, transportive and stubborn in its resistance to being narrowingly defined.

There are some homes that arise from undisputed circumstances, and others, like Vietnam is for me, that may take a lifetime to know. Australia is the home I grew up in as a child. Vietnam, my birth place, is a home I grew up in as an adult. I need not be on either soil to sense their protection and their influence. At times, it takes being locationally absent for places of home to set. More often than not it has been in lands far from the southern cross which have showed me the way back to some of the places I belong. It does not take anything too monumental to rouse my national heart. For me, a few lyrics of the band Crowded House, which provided the soundtrack of my adolescence will suffice, a particular colour of green brings to mind the Adelaide Hills, and the smell of sea air, always takes me instantly to Australia. Since leaving Vietnam – for a second time – the slightest things: a dragon fly, rice paddy green, a bunch of potent coriander, conical hats, all highlight a homeward direction. Some places, like some people, are best loved from a distance.

Geographically, there are places I have journeyed to that have felt like home the moment my feet have met the ground, and there are others in which I have lived for quite some time before being able to feel gratitude towards them. These days, home takes the form of where I find myself staying. I am enjoying a passage of transience and impermanence. I suspect this will change one day, but until that time, I am learning to value and find continuity and groundedness in interesting places.

A sense of ambiguity about where one comes from, where one calls home, where one belongs, is becoming an increasingly common experience. By choice and for many reasons, people now move across states, they uproot themselves and start new lives in other countries.

I have a sister somewhere in the world. We were in the orphanage at the same time. I wonder about her, of how her life has panned out. How has she made sense of her life after Vietnam? I think of her and my thoughts expand out to consider other children, hundreds and thousands of children in orphanages everywhere.

Reportedly over twenty million people around the globe are displaced at this minute, as a result of war, natural catastrophes, civil conflict and systematic oppression. It is not a new phenomenon, this migration of peoples traversing across oceans to places where a new language and culture awaits them. Perhaps what is unique about these times is the hope many of us hold for the welfare of those who are creating home in new strange landscapes. Despite the overtones of the current political climate, many of us do genuinely care about where they have come from, we stand for their right to be heard, no matter what language they speak, and we long to understand their stories to better assist all of us to find a place to peacefully reside.

In all our communities and in all our services, I believe we need to find ways to acknowledge thatfor many of us, home rests in a multiplicity of places.

An Australian passport is designated to a citizen of that country. I grew up in Australia, it is a culture I identify with and the country my family of origin reside in. This would be considered home. It is and it’s not.

In conventional understandings, Vietnam is ‘my country’. I took my first breath in Vietnam, I have Vietnamese family, this would seem to fulfill the criteria of an assumed definition for home. It is, and it is not.

A tourist is a visitor to another country, who has, at least a superficial interest, and at most a long held passionate affiliation, with somewhere other than their home country. I was a tourist in Vietnam, and I was not.

I have recently come across the term ‘Australian diaspora’, a term referring to the recorded eight hundred thousand Australians who live overseas, for various reasons foregoing wide sandy beaches, flattened vowels and all things ending in Y – Barby and Chrissy to name a couple. In my experience, one of the ways of being known has been in identifying as an Australian Abroad, which has brought an interesting perspective for me and perhaps contributes towards developing an increasingly ecclectic and inclusive Australian national identity.

The widely experienced phenomena of the Vietnamese diaspora over the last thirty years has created a Vietnamese term called Vietkeow. Translated, this refers to a community of ‘overseas Vietnamese’, which for me seems to impart an acceptance and a tolerance I feel priveleged to have experienced.

I am now getting ready to pack up my bags and move again to another state. A new adventure beckons and consequently so too does a new home. One day it might be nice to witness a few seasons in the same abode, but until then, I am revelling in the distant call of ‘somewhere’. It is enlivening to me to travel, it being such an opportunity and privilege. For me, it is a way to jump into the unknown, to see just who and what I can learn from and contribute to. In this, no doubt I am in good company. So many people, far from their original homes, are walking the earth, disrupting conventions, playing their part in forming new communities and subsequently creating a new world.

SO MANY GOODBYES

Today I leave Vietnam for the second time in my lifetime. I stand at the manmade demarcation
between two countries, Vietnam and Cambodia. I feel fatigued and my arms and legs are aching from sitting in one place for many hours. My mind, however, is not still. It remains overly occupied with sorting and contemplating all it has dealt with in the past few days.

The children of the Mother Mekong jump into the muddy waters, legs flayling and arms waving wildly about as they shout out from the other side of the riverbank to me – this vietkow, a locally born visiting traveler. I cannot help but smile back. I knew in that moment that it would not matter when or even if I returned. The decision will be mine, as it always has been. But if I do decide to come back, I know my return will bring with it a sense that I never left. And that, for me, is what
experiences of home feel like.

REFERENCES

Simmons Thomas, L. (2001) ‘An unfinished identity project.’ Dulwich Centre Journal, 3&4:11-21.

Simmons Thomas, L. (2001) ‘Telling birthing stories.’ In Dulwich Centre Publications (eds): Working with the Stories of Women’s Lives(chp. 5), pp.43-50. Adelaide: Dulwich Centre Publications.

Simmons Thomas, L. (1999) ‘Redefining a version of family and nationality.’ In Dulwich Centre Publications (eds): Narrative Therapy & Community Work: A conference collection(chp. 5), pp.57-59. Adelaide: Dulwich Centre Publications.

FURTHER READING

Jeong Trenka, J., Chinyere Oparah, J. & Yung Shin, S. (eds) (2006) Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption. South End.

_____________________________

Leonie Simmons is the author of ‘Redefining a version of family and nationality.’ (1999), ‘Telling birthing stories’ (2001) and ‘An unfinished identity project’ (2001). She can be contacted c/o Dulwich Centre Publications.

This was first published in the International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work, and a DVD is currently being produced. Contact Dulwich Centre Publications for more details.

ANAND, India (AP) — Every night in this quiet western Indian city, 15 pregnant women prepare for sleep in the spacious house they share, ascending the stairs in a procession of ballooned bellies, to bedrooms that become a landscape of soft hills.

A team of maids, cooks and doctors looks after the women, whose pregnancies would be unusual anywhere else but are common here. The young mothers of Anand, a place famous for its milk, are pregnant with the children of infertile couples from around the world.

The small clinic at Kaival Hospital matches infertile couples with local women, cares for the women during pregnancy and delivery, and counsels them afterward. Anand’s surrogate mothers, pioneers in the growing field of outsourced pregnancies, have given birth to roughly 40 babies.

More than 50 women in this city are now pregnant with the children of couples from the United States, Taiwan, Britain and beyond. The women earn more than many would make in 15 years. But the program raises a host of uncomfortable questions that touch on morals and modern science, exploitation and globalization, and that most natural of desires: to have a family.

Dr. Nayna Patel, the woman behind Anand’s baby boom, defends her work as meaningful for everyone involved.

“There is this one woman who desperately needs a baby and cannot have her own child without the help of a surrogate. And at the other end there is this woman who badly wants to help her [own] family,” Patel said. “If this female wants to help the other one … why not allow that? … It’s not for any bad cause. They’re helping one another to have a new life in this world.”

Experts say commercial surrogacy — or what has been called “wombs for rent” — is growing in India. While no reliable numbers track such pregnancies nationwide, doctors work with surrogates in virtually every major city. The women are impregnated in-vitro with the egg and sperm of couples unable to conceive on their own.

Commercial surrogacy has been legal in India since 2002, as it is in many other countries, including the United States. But India is the leader in making it a viable industry rather than a rare fertility treatment. Experts say it could take off for the same reasons outsourcing in other industries has been successful: a wide labor pool working for relatively low rates.

Critics say the couples are exploiting poor women in India — a country with an alarmingly high maternal death rate — by hiring them at a cut-rate cost to undergo the hardship, pain and risks of labor.

“It raises the factor of baby farms in developing countries,” said Dr. John Lantos of the Center for Practical Bioethics in Kansas City, Mo. “It comes down to questions of voluntariness and risk.”

Patel’s surrogates are aware of the risks because they’ve watched others go through them. Many of the mothers know one another, or are even related. Three sisters have all borne strangers’ children, and their sister-in-law is pregnant with a second surrogate baby. Nearly half the babies have been born to foreign couples while the rest have gone to Indians.

Ritu Sodhi, a furniture importer from Los Angeles who was born in India, spent $200,000 trying to get pregnant through in-vitro fertilization, and was considering spending another $80,000 to hire a surrogate mother in the United States.

“We were so desperate,” she said. “It was emotionally and financially exhausting.”

Then, on the Internet, Sodhi found Patel’s clinic.

After spending about $20,000 — more than many couples because it took the surrogate mother several cycles to conceive — Sodhi and her husband are now back home with their 4-month-old baby, Neel. They plan to return to Anand for a second child.

“Even if it cost $1 million, the joy that they had delivered to me is so much more than any money that I have given them,” said Sodhi. “They’re godsends to deliver something so special.”

Patel’s center is believed to be unique in offering one-stop service. Other clinics may request that the couple bring in their own surrogate, often a family member or friend, and some place classified ads. But in Anand the couple just provides the egg and sperm and the clinic does the rest, drawing from a waiting list of tested and ready surrogates.

Young women are flocking to the clinic to sign up for the list.

Suman Dodia, a pregnant, baby-faced 26-year-old, said she will buy a house with the $4,500 she receives from the British couple whose child she’s carrying. It would have taken her 15 years to earn that on her maid’s monthly salary of $25.

Dodia’s own three children were delivered at home and she said she never visited a doctor during those pregnancies.

“It’s very different with medicine,” Dodia said, resting her hands on her hugely pregnant belly. “I’m being more careful now than I was with my own pregnancy.”

Patel said she carefully chooses which couples to help and which women to hire as surrogates. She only accepts couples with serious fertility issues, like survivors of uterine cancer. The surrogate mothers have to be between 18 and 45, have at least one child of their own, and be in good medical shape.

Like some fertility reality show, a rotating cast of surrogate mothers live together in a home rented by the clinic and overseen by a former surrogate mother. They receive their children and husbands as visitors during the day, when they’re not busy with English or computer classes.

“They feel like my family,” said Rubina Mandul, 32, the surrogate house’s den mother. “The first 10 days are hard, but then they don’t want to go home.”

Mandul, who has two sons of her own, gave birth to a child for an American couple in February. She said she misses the baby, but she stays in touch with the parents over the Internet. A photo of the American couple with the child hangs over the sofa.

“They need a baby more than me,” she said.

The surrogate mothers and the parents sign a contract that promises the couple will cover all medical expenses in addition to the woman’s payment, and the surrogate mother will hand over the baby after birth. The couples fly to Anand for the in-vitro fertilization and again for the birth. Most couples end up paying the clinic less than $10,000 for the entire procedure, including fertilization, the fee to the mother and medical expenses.

Counseling is a major part of the process and Patel tells the women to think of the pregnancy as “someone’s child comes to stay at your place for nine months.”

Kailas Gheewala, 25, said she doesn’t think of the pregnancy as her own.

“The fetus is theirs, so I’m not sad to give it back,” said Gheewala, who plans to save the $6,250 she’s earning for her two daughters’ education. “The child will go to the U.S. and lead a better life and I’ll be happy.”

Patel said none of the surrogate mothers has had especially difficult births or serious medical problems, but risks are inescapable.

“We have to be very careful,” she said. “We overdo all the health investigations. We do not take any chances.”

Health experts expect to see more Indian commercial surrogacy programs in coming years. Dr. Indira Hinduja, a prominent fertility specialist who was behind India’s first test-tube baby two decades ago, receives several surrogacy inquiries a month from couples overseas.

“People are accepting it,” said Hinduja. “Earlier they used to be ashamed but now they are becoming more broadminded.”

But if commercial surrogacy keeps growing, some fear it could change from a medical necessity for infertile women to a convenience for the rich.

“You can picture the wealthy couples of the West deciding that pregnancy is just not worth the trouble anymore and the whole industry will be farmed out,” said Lantos.

Or, Lantos said, competition among clinics could lead to compromised safety measures and “the clinic across the street offers it for 20 percent less and one in Bangladesh undercuts that and pretty soon conditions get bad.”

The industry is not regulated by the government. Health officials have issued nonbinding ethical guidelines and called for legislation to protect the surrogates and the children.

For now, the surrogate mothers in Anand seem as pleased with the arrangement as the new parents.

“I know this isn’t mine,” said Jagrudi Sharma, 34, pointing to her belly. “But I’m giving happiness to another couple. And it’s great for me.”

Read the full article here: http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/12/30/india.wombs.for.rent.ap/index.html

The results of U.S. research in Romania, being published on Friday in the journal Science, found that toddlers placed in foster families developed significantly higher I.Q.’s by age 4, on average, than peers who spent those years in an orphanage.

Psychologists have long believed that growing up in an institution like an orphanage stunts children’s mental development but have never had direct evidence to back it up.

Now they do, from an experiment in Romania that compared the effects of foster care with those of institutional child-rearing.

The study, being published on Friday in the journal Science, found that toddlers placed in foster families developed significantly higher I.Q.’s by age 4, on average, than peers who spent those years in an orphanage.

The difference was large – eight I.Q. points – and the study found that the earlier children joined a foster family, the better they did. Children who moved from institutional care to families after age 2 made few gains on average, though the experience varied from child to child. Both groups, however, had significantly lower I.Q.’s than a comparison group of children raised by their biological families.

Some developmental psychologists had sharply criticized the study and its sponsor, the MacArthur Foundation, for researching a question whose answer seemed obvious. But previous attempts to compare institutional and foster care suffered from serious flaws, mainly because no one knew whether children who landed in orphanages were different in unknown ways from those in foster care.

Experts said the new study should put to rest any doubts about the harmful effects of institutionalization – and might help speed up adoptions from countries that still allow them.

“Most of us take it as almost intuitive that being in a family is better for humans than being in an orphanage,” said Seth Pollak, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, who was not involved in the research. “But other governments don’t like to be told how to handle policy issues based on intuition.

“What makes this study important is that it gives objective data to say that if you’re going to allow international adoptions, then it’s a good idea to speed things up and get kids into families quickly.”

In recent years many countries, including Romania, have banned or sharply restricted adoptions of local children. In other countries, adoption procedures can drag on for many months.

The authors of the new paper, led by Dr. Charles Zeanah of Tulane University and Charles Nelson of Harvard and Children’s Hospital in Boston, approached Romanian officials in the late 1990s about conducting the study. The country had been working to improve conditions at its orphanages, which became infamous in the early 1990s as Dickensian warehouses for abandoned children.

After gaining clearance from the government, the researchers began to track 136 children who had been abandoned at birth. They administered developmental tests to the children and then randomly assigned them to continue at one of Bucharest’s six large orphanages, or join an adoptive family. The foster families were carefully screened and provided “very high-quality care,” Nelson said.

On I.Q. tests taken at 54 months, the foster children scored an average of 81, compared with 73 among the children who continued in an institution. The children who moved into foster care at the youngest ages tended to show the most improvement, the researchers found.

The comparison group of youngsters who grew up in their biological families had an average I.Q. of 109 at the same age, found the researchers, who announced their preliminary findings as soon as they were known.

“Institutions and environments vary enormously across the world and within countries,” Nelson said, “but I think these findings generalize to many situations, from kids in institutions to those in abusive households and even bad foster care arrangements.” The study’s message, he said, is that children should be moved into more caring environments, ideally before age 2.

In setting up the study, the researchers directly addressed the ethical issue of assigning children to institutional care, which was suspected to be harmful.

“If a government is to consider alternatives to institutional care for abandoned children, it must know how the alternative compares to the standard care it provides,” they wrote. “In Romania, this meant comparing the standard of care to a new and alternative form of care.”

Any number of factors common to institutions could work to delay or blunt intellectual development, experts say: the regimentation, the indifference to individual differences in children’s habits and needs and, most of all, the limited access to caregivers, who in some institutions can be responsible for more than 20 children at a time.

“The evidence seems to say,” said Pollak, “that for humans, we need a lot of responsive care giving, an adult who recognizes your distinct cry, knows when you’re hungry or in pain and gives you the opportunity to crawl around and handle different things, safely, when you’re ready.”

Read full article here: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/20/europe/orphans.php#end_main

Luisa*, 16, is living with her one-year-old daughter in a home for young mothers in Guatemala City run by Casa Alianza, a non-profit organisation which helps children living on the streets and vulnerable teenagers.

I was in a relationship with a guy and I got pregnant. My mother was really angry about it. She banned me from seeing him and we took the decision to have an abortion.

I went with this lady to have injections to induce an abortion but it didn’t work.

Then my aunt found an ad in the paper that offered help to pregnant teenagers.

My aunt and I went to the city to see the people and soon afterwards they called to say they had a place for me in a home already. I stayed with them until I had the baby.

I wasn’t the only one there. There were six, seven, eight girls in the pregnancy home, some older and some younger than me.

We didn’t really talk – we were kept in our rooms almost all the time. Our families would come to visit once a week.

The people at the home didn’t say anything about adoption for a while. Then, when the baby was born, they asked me if I wanted to give her up for adoption or if I wanted to keep her.

My parents and I decided that we would give her up, although from the start I didn’t really want to.

The adoption lawyer made me sign some documents and some blank papers. I asked why I had to sign these blank papers and she said it was for the adoption process.

My baby was born on 21 November 2006 and they took her away from me on 7 December.

The lawyer told me she would give me money for the baby but I said I didn’t want anything.

Lawyer’s threat

So why did I agree? Well, my parents didn’t have very much money and these people told me that the baby would have a home and education.

But at the same time I didn’t feel good about giving her up. From the day I did, I cried all day every day, and when I saw people with their babies I felt I was a really bad mother.

After that, I got together with the guy again and he asked me about the girl. He knew I was giving her up but he didn’t agree with it.

We decided to go to the adoption lawyer’s office and ask her if I could have my baby back. She said no.

The lawyer gave me two options. She said I had to give my baby up, or my boyfriend.

She told me that if I didn’t give up my baby, she would have an arrest warrant issued for him because I was under-age and he was 20, so he’d had sex with a minor.

She also said I would have to repay everything she had spent on me – for the Caesarean section, the medical bills, the costs for my time in the pregnancy home.

At that point, I decided to leave things the way they were. We had no money to pay.

‘Amazing love’

A while later I received a call from the lawyer, saying my parents and I had to go to the PGN (Solicitor General’s Office) to sign the adoption papers.

The lawyer there asked if I wanted to give my baby up. This was my chance to say no – which I did.

My parents got very angry and left me in the street outside the office. But with my sister’s support, I signed the papers to say I’d changed my mind – and now here I am with my baby.

I talked to my mother for the first time today [since it happened] and she said she wants me back in the family home with the baby.

But I’d rather live with my boyfriend. He can offer me everything I need for the baby because he’s working here in the city, and I want to go with him and have my own life.

I’m really happy to have my daughter back. She’s just had her first birthday.

I’d tell girls in the same situation as I was to keep their babies, to keep fighting because they are worth it and the love you have for them is amazing.

Original article is here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7144610.stm

When Adoption Goes Wrong; Most Americans who adopt children from
other countries find joy. But others aren’t prepared for the
risks-and may find themselves overwhelmed.

Peggy Hilt wanted to be a good mother. But day after day, she got out
of bed feeling like a failure. No matter what she tried, she couldn’t
connect with Nina, the 2-year old girl she’d adopted from Russia as
an infant. The preschooler pulled away whenever Hilt tried to hug or
kiss her. Nina was physically aggressive with her 4-year-old sister,
who had been adopted from Ukraine, and had violent tantrums. Whenever
Hilt wasn’t watching, she destroyed the family’s furniture and
possessions. “Every day with Nina had become a struggle,” she recalls now.

As the girl grew older, things got worse. Hilt fell into a deep
depression. She started drinking heavily, something she’d never done
before. Ashamed, she hid her problem from everyone, including her husband.

On the morning of July 1, 2005, Hilt was packing for a family
vacation, all the while downing one beer after another and growing
increasingly aggravated and impatient with Nina’s antics. “Everything
she did just got to me,” Hilt said. When Hilt caught her reaching
into her diaper and smearing feces on the walls and furniture, “a
year and a half of frustration came to a head,” Hilt says. “I
snapped. I felt this uncontrollable rage.”

Then Hilt did something unthinkable. She grabbed Nina around the
neck, shook her and then dropped her to the floor, where she kicked
her repeatedly before dragging her up to her room, punching her as
they went. “I had never hit a child before,” she says. “I felt
horrible and promised myself that this would never happen again.” But
it was too late for that. Nina woke up with a fever, and then started
vomiting. The next day she stopped breathing. By the time the
ambulance got the child to the hospital, she was dead.

Hilt is now serving a 19-year sentence for second-degree murder in a
Virginia maximum-security prison. She and her husband divorced, and
he is raising their other daughter. She realizes the horror of her
crime and says she isn’t looking for sympathy. “There is no
punishment severe enough for what I did,” she told NEWSWEEK in an
interview at the prison.

Hilt’s story is awful-and rare-but sadly it is not unique. Adopting a
child from another country is usually a positive, enriching
experience for both the child and the parent. Over the last 20 years,
foreign adoption has become more popular, and Americans now adopt
about 20,000 children from Guatemala, China, Russia and other nations
each year. (In the last few years, as restrictions and red tape have
increased in some countries, the number of overseas adoptions has
begun to drop.) Longitudinal studies show that most of these kids do
quite well, but in a small but significant number of cases, things go
very badly. Since the early 1990s, the deaths of 14 Russian children
killed by their adoptive parents have been documented. (That
disclosure was partly responsible for Russia’s decision in 2006 to
suspend its intercountry adoption program while it underwent review.)

Cases like those are extreme, but clinicians who specialize in
treating foreign orphans say they are seeing more parents who are
overwhelmed by their adopted children’s unexpected emotional and
behavioral problems. And though reputable agencies try to warn
parents of the risks, not all succeed. “In the past, agencies were a
bit naive,” says Chuck Johnson of the National Council For Adoption,
which is responding to the problem with a massive education
initiative. “Now we’re urging them to give parents a more realistic
message.” Some parents struggle to find effective treatment for their
kids. Others seek to give them up. Reports that a growing number of
foreign adoptees were being turned over to the U.S. foster-care
system recently prompted the Department of Health and Human Services
to order its first national count: 81 children adopted overseas were
relinquished to officials in 14 states in 2006.

Why do some adoptions go so wrong? Clearly, it’s not the kids’ fault.
Their behavior is usually the result of trauma, mistreatment,
malnutrition or institutionalization in their home countries-problems
more common in places like Eastern Europe. But “the country of origin
doesn’t matter so much as the child’s experience,” says Dr. Dana
Johnson, director of the University of Minnesota’s International
Adoption Clinic. Some are found to suffer from fetal alcohol
syndrome, mental illness or reactive attachment disorder, an
inability to bond with a parent. Prospective families undergo an
arduous screening process, including home visits, and specify how
much disability they can handle. But even families who specifically
request a “healthy” child sometimes go home with a troubled one. In
some cases, the mismatch is inadvertent. But in others, orphanages or
adoption agencies overseas-eager to find homes for difficult children
in their care-mislead prospective parents or fail to disclose the
full extent of a child’s problems or personal history.

Emotional and even physical problems can be difficult to detect at
the time of adoption, especially in infants, and often aren’t
diagnosed until months or years later. Hilt says that’s what happened
to her. She and her husband decided to adopt after being told she’d
probably never conceive. After passing their agency’s screening, they
brought home their first daughter from Ukraine in 2001, and that went
so well they decided to adopt two Russian sisters. But when they flew
to Siberia to meet them in May 2003, they were told the sisters were
no longer available. Instead, they were told, they could adopt
Tatiana, a lively 18-month-old, and Nina, a quiet, withdrawn
9-month-old. They visited Tatiana every day for a week, but officials
never let them see Nina again. “They said she had a bad cold,” Hilt
said. Nonetheless, they signed adoption papers for both girls. But
when they returned to finalize the adoption in January 2004, they
were told that only Nina was still available. The Hilts hesitated.
They suspected a bait-and-switch, especially when officials insisted
they sign papers testifying they’d spent many more hours with the
baby than they had. “The whole process didn’t feel right,” Hilt said.
“But we figured we could love any child. You convince yourself that
everything will turn out OK.”

But from the start, Nina “literally pushed me away,” Hilt said. Over
time, Hilt found herself resenting the little girl. “We’d been such a
happy family, and then Nina came and everything changed,” Hilt says.
“I began to realize that we had made such a big mistake.” (Tatyana
Kharchendo, the doctor in charge of the Little Sun Child Home #1 in
Irkutsk, where the Hilts adopted Nina, did not directly answer Hilt’s
charges, but insisted the child “was absolutely healthy and beautiful.”)

No one is exonerating Hilt or others like her. But Joyce Sterkel, who
runs the Ranch for Kids, a Montana boarding school for disturbed
international adoptees, says she’s come to see the parents as well as
the kids as victims in these tragic cases. “It’s a horrible thing,
but I understand how some people end up killing these kids,” she
says. “They have no empathy, no affection, no love. My heart goes out
to these parents because they don’t know what to do.”

When Sterkel, a nurse, first started working with international
adoptees in the early ’90s, she didn’t see many deeply troubled
children. But 10 years ago she adopted two Russian boys whose
American parents had given up on them. One of them, a 14-year-old
boy, had just been released from a juvenile-detention center after
trying to poison his mother. Over time, Sterkel was approached so
often about adopting other children that she decided to open her
camp. Today it houses 25 to 30 kids from all over the country, and
has a waiting list. The overwhelming majority are from Russia,
Romania and Bulgaria, but she also has had children from South Korea
and Colombia. Some were bullied or raped while institutionalized or
were the children of prostitutes, drug addicts or alcoholics. “I have
gotten calls from parents who say the child they adopted has killed
the family dog, threatened to kill them, and no one will help them,” she says.

Emotional, behavioral and physical problems are not unique to adopted
children. Biological children can have the same range of issues. But
adoptive parents often assume they know what they’re getting into
because they get the chance to meet their child in advance. That was
the case when Kimble and Shellie Elmore of Los Angeles met a
10-year-old Russian child named Tania in 2005. The director of the
orphanage proudly described her as an “angel.”

But as soon as they took custody of their new daughter, her behavior
changed dramatically. “She was completely out of control,” Kimble
says. Tania would scream for hours at a time, then fall into deep
sullen silence. After signing Tania over to the Elmores, the Russian
court handed them her file. They were stunned to find that she had a
history of violence and had been transferred from one orphanage to
another. They called their adoption agency back home, but were
mistakenly told that there was nothing that could be done, that Tania
was now their legal daughter. (The American Embassy could have
helped, if they’d known.) Seeing no alternative, they boarded a plane
and brought Tania back to California. By the end of the first week,
she was admitted to a hospital psychiatric unit. She came home a few
days later, but things grew worse. She tried to stab her father with
a spike and attacked a police officer who came to the house in
response to a 911 call.

Doctors diagnosed Tania with bipolar disorder, posttraumatic stress
disorder and attachment disorder, and suggested she be sent to
Sterkel’s camp. In the past year the Elmores have exhausted their
savings and retirement funds trying to pay for private residential
treatment. “We know she’s just a child and we want what’s best for
her,” says Kimble. “But we don’t know how to help her. Adoption is
supposed to be a touchy-feely thing surrounded with the glow of new
parenthood. But no one says, ‘What if the worst happens?’ ”

Psychologist Karyn Purvis of Texas Christian University, who has done
extensive research on troubled adopted children, says many of these
kids simply don’t respond to stern lectures and timeouts. Lab workups
of her patients often reveal extremely high levels of cortisol, the
stress hormone. “The children, for the most part, were in safe homes
living with safe people,” Purvis says, “but those cortisol levels
told us that their children did not feel safe with them, even if
they’d been living safely with them for years.” Children like them
are almost constantly in a hypervigilant state, she says. They don’t
let their guard down long enough to forge affectionate relationships.

Over the past several years Purvis has developed new methods to
restore a sense of security and trust to traumatized kids. If a child
becomes violent, for instance, Purvis often responds with a “basket
hold.” She cradles the kids firmly but gently in her lap, facing
outward, with their arms crossed in front of their chests. She rocks
and quietly soothes until they calm down, then asks them to look her
in the eye and tell her what they want. Purvis’s assistants have
taken to calling her the “Child Whisperer.”

Sometimes techniques like these result in dramatic turnarounds. The
family of a 5-year-old adopted from Russia thought they had no choice
but to seek psychiatric hospitalization after she threw her baby
sister down the stairs. But after the parents adopted Purvis’s
methods, the little girl finally started talking about the serious
abuse she’d experienced. The child’s behavior changed markedly. But
her mother “changed even more,” Purvis says, “because now she has hope.”

Purvis is quick to say that her techniques don’t work with every
child, and older kids can take much longer than younger ones. “They
have to unlearn what they’ve learned,” she said. The next step, she
says, is for prospective adoptive parents to get more training before
and after they adopt. “Very few agencies are training parents to deal
with brain damage, sensory deprivation, aggression,” Purvis says. “A
lot of these parents are smitten with the hope that they’ll make a
difference in a child’s life, but they need very practical tools. I
consider myself very pro-adoption. But I’m also very pro informed adoption. ”

Peggy Hilt wishes she’d heard this message years ago. “If I knew then
what I know now,” she says, “I would have gotten help for Nina and
for me.” The best she can hope for now, she says, is that her story
will prompt others to seek that help before it’s too late.

Original article is here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/74385