When international adoptee Marcia Engel set out to find her biological parents, she found that the system wasn’t geared to helping her—and that intermediary bodies were even exploiting her quest.
Her response was to create a network to give families the opportunity to reunite without having to resort to paying for help.
“I wanted to have this free registration system,” said Engel. “It is important that adoptees and their parents have the option to search for one another. Currently, parents and adoptees have little information and they always experience bumps in the road, dead ends.”
Engel’s newly launched Adoption Angels Network (www.adoptionangelsnetwork.com) is part of her initiative, Plan Angel, created after a long and torturous search for her biological parents.
“I found out that I was adopted when I was 11,” she said. “My mother told me that I didn’t come out her stomach. She told me that there wasn’t any information on my background and that even if I wanted to look for it, it wasn’t possible.”
Still, she persisted, partly out of a feeling of alienation: “I felt lonely,” she recalled. “People asked why I looked different from my sister who had blond hair and blue eyes. I felt angry as I felt that nature had simply made me look different and they shouldn’t question it.”
A difficult search
Engel began to search the house and found some papers, dated 1981, which mentioned a Martha Patricia Ramirez. “As my name was Marcia Engel, I thought that another child had passed through the house,” she recalled.
Engel eventually learned that she was brought to an orphanage in Colombia as a one-year old. They didn’t know much about her, not even her birth date. She was adopted a year later by Dutch parents.
She started trying to look in earnest in 1999 using the Spoorloos programme (www.spoorloos.kro.nl). In the end the organization sent her a letter saying that they couldn’t help.
“For many years I thought it wasn’t possible to look for my roots,” she said. “I never imagined that my parents in Colombia would think about me or search for me. As I didn’t think that my parents really thought about me, I didn’t go further.”
Engel decided to try again in 2005 and telephoned the orphanage in Colombia noted in her adoption papers: “They sent me back my mother’s name and the name of a correspondent from Spoorloos, who could help me with my search. I had to pay around 600 euros for the service.”
Within four months, Engel had found her biological family and, after corresponding with them by phone and Internet for eight months, she made the trip to the land of her birth.
Meeting the family
Often, the reunion doesn’t go one might expect, say many adoptees who have found their biological parents.
“It was a beautiful experience but it wasn’t what I’d dreamed about,” recalled Engel. “My biological mother told me her story: When I was eleven months old, she left me with a women and the government took me from her. The actual story was that she left me when I was two months old with a friend of hers -- she was only seventeen. The friend took me to the police and I ended up in the orphanage.”
Engel also detailed how her father found out via her grandmother that Engel was in the orphanage and went to find her -- he already had Engel’s older brother whom Engel’s mother had given birth to when she was 14 years old. But her father learned that she had already been adopted by people living in a foreign country.
“My biological father is very sweet: I see many similarities between him and me,” said Engel. “But I felt deceived by my own mother though: She kept changing the details in the story about how I ended up in the orphanage. But still, the most important thing is that I found her. And I found peace within myself.”
Corrupt systems
These days, Engel is concerned that in poor countries like Columbia, parents don’t know their rights. “There isn’t any government control and the system is riddled with human error,” she said. “The system doesn’t work for children, it’s corrupt. You see the same thing in other countries.”
In 2007, the Dutch papers reported that Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin was tightening up supervision on adoption in response to two investigations which showed that the monitoring of adoptions leaves much to be desired. For instance, in India, one orphanage had arranged 350 illegal adoptions whereby children were abducted or taken from their families under false pretences.
And in July, Ballin asked the Dutch childcare agency to investigate the adoption of children from China following revelations in a television programme that, in one of China’s provinces, authorities force parents to give their children up for adoption to foreigners. On their official papers, it lists the children as orphans.
It is also easier and quicker to adopt if you have money or status, a disturbing factor in the adoption ‘marketplace’ where demand far exceeds the supply of children, says Engel.
Having been involved with activist groups in the adoption field, Engel sees such organisations as often being “too busy with their politics to do anything that counts for the near future.” She says she would like to see such groups making inroads to convince governments to address their loose regulations governing adoption and child trafficking.
Meanwhile she set up her own project: “I wanted to set up a support network which focused on the basic rights of the child and their families.” And through Plan Angel, Marcia is working with organisations such as childtrafficking.org which files lawsuits against governments and agencies when necessary.
Adoption angels
Currently, there are systems which enable those searching for biological parents to log in and scroll through page upon page where they can read messages in the hope of finding one’s parents. But they still aren’t accessible to many people, says Engel.
“My parents in Colombia have never heard of such things,” she said. “It is important that locals hear about what to do and that it is for free. You can use other media such as radio, local people working in the community and on the street, a postal address, telephone, all of which I have set up in Colombia. It’s really informal.”
She adds that Colombia is her pilot project but is working to set up networks in other countries, such as in Lebanon where the Amma Foundation has supported the project.
She plans to get volunteers in various nations to become a contact person in their country of residence, to get the word out.
The right to know
Adoption Angels Network is just one of the projects that Engel is involved with. Another, Adoption Files Network, involves collecting as many adoption files as possible to show just how many are incomplete in order to appeal to the international court, says Engel.
“We would also like to have better adoption care,” she said. “We are doing this through working with specialists who have a clear picture of adoption. We need people who can give you the right legal advice on adoption without the adoptees and families having to travel here, there and everywhere. We already have experts working for us in Belgium, Canada and the US, as well as in the Netherlands.”
“The child’s rights and their right to know comes first,” she added. “I hope Plan Angel helps many children and their families in the future to find their way.”
Natasha Gunn/Expatica
Photos and video: Marcia Engel
November 2010 update
Since this article was published, Marcia has made further inroads with her plans to help international adoptees find their families. You can now subscribe to a Plan Angel newsletter.
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One woman’s search to find her biological parents across an ocean has led to a network to help other foreign-born adopted children.
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