A WOMAN has shared how she discovered she was separated from her twin sister at birth and sold through an illegal adoption ring.

Ano Sartania, 21, was left stunned when she was reunited with her sister Amy thanks to a TikTok video but the real shock came when the pair found out they shared three more siblings.

Ano was reunited with Amy after 19 years after they were separated at birth

The twins born in June 2002, had been sold to an illegal adoption ring in Georgia

They reconnected thanks to a TikTok video after a friend noticed the resemblance

They were adopted as biological sisters but discovered that they share 0.0 per cent of their DNA. The discovery of the sisters Doriet and Mirjam Begemann was the start of their search for the truth. Shocking is that they are not alone. Some countries stop with intercountry adoption altogether. Read here why.

Their adoptive parents had no idea that they were being tricked into the adoption, the sisters tell the Dutch daily Reformatorisch Dagblad. In 1979, there had been an official adoption procedure in court and by the notary.

In addition, a Dutch lawyer looked at the case as well. "Who would have thought that something was wrong?" the sisters point out. "The Indonesians were so sneaky: our parents did not get the translation of our papers until the day they went back to the Netherlands. Just imagine you're in a hot country with two little children; then you want to go home as soon as possible. And how could they have compared the translation with the original documents?"

Later, they discover irregularities in their official documents. Signatures do not match, and birth dates seem to be falsified. Then, a DNA test confirms their fears: the alleged sisters are not biologically related at all.

Abuses

A Dutch group that reunites children with their birth parents in Bangladesh is fighting to change the international adoption system

It was not long into a research trip to Bangladesh, on behalf of an organisation seeking to reunite children adopted abroad with their birth relatives, when Kana Verheul found herself huddled in a cafe toilet, comparing birthmarks with a stranger.

That trip seven years ago was one of many that Verheul, 47, had taken to the country of her birth since she was 16 years old, travelling back to Bangladesh for the first time as part of a “roots trip” organised by the Dutch government for children such as her, an orphan adopted to the Netherlands as a baby.

But this trip was different. After decades of trying in vain to find her siblings, Verheul joined forces with other people in her situation to set up an organisation called the Shapla Community, creating a network of hundreds of Bangladeshi adoptees raised in the Netherlands. If she could not find her own family, she could at least help others find theirs.

Is it really in the child's best interest that we send him to an institution so early? Or could we arrange our lives differently while we have small children? Hye Secher Marcussen believes that feminists should take the lead and secure better rights for children.

Hye Secher Marcussen's biological mother knew that she would not be allowed to keep her child if she gave birth to another girl.

Hye's biological father had decided that. The parents already had two girls, and he didn't want any more. He wanted a boy.

So when the mother gave birth to Hye and they saw she was a girl, they immediately adopted her.

Instead, they adopted a boy and made him theirs. They let the outside world understand that it was him with whom Hye's mother had been pregnant.

When Social Affairs Minister Pernille Rosenkrantz-Theil closed and switched off Denmark's only adoption agency on national television on 16 January, it was with the words:

"Significant crisis", "children who should not have been adopted", "children who have been trafficked".

Maya's story

Maja Tae Sook Dreyer , Schlicht Katharina (authors)

This is the story of a special woman and her self-discovery against all odds.
Maja doesn't know her parents, her birthday or her exact place of birth. Just a few weeks old, she was abandoned in Daegu (South Korea) in 1969. After two years in an orphanage in Seoul, she was placed in Germany for adoption.
Here, disturbing borderline experiences of strangeness, rejection, domestic violence, sexual assault and a suicide attempt determine her childhood.
She feels more and more clearly her unconditional will to live and her longing for belonging and a self-determined life in her new home. Therefore, the later encounter with her country of birth is not the focus of the novella. Rather, the authors illustrate in powerful scenes how Maja successfully fights for a fulfilled life despite lasting moments of inner conflict and the role her daughter, her husband and her job as a yoga teacher play in this.
It is also the story of the friendship of two women who at first glance seem very different. The past can be processed together, the present can be experienced and the future can be shaped.

A U.S. man who founded an orphanage in Haiti was charged Monday with traveling from Miami to the Caribbean country to have sex with underage children after spending over a decade dodging accusations that he abused minors in his care.

Michael Karl Geilenfeld, 71, who was arrested Saturday in Denver, had even won a multimillion-dollar defamation lawsuit in a Maine federal court against an advocate who accused him of sexually abusing boys at his orphanage in Haiti. Geilenfeld had also been arrested in Haiti on the very same allegations that landed him in a Port-au-Prince jail amid the defamation battle —only to have the case dismissed by a judge when some of his alleged victims were a no-show in court.

Geilenfeld is expected to have a detention hearing in federal court in Denver on Thursday, and will later be flown to Miami. A federal grand jury has indicted him on a charge of traveling to Haiti from Miami International Airport “for the purpose of engaging in any illicit sexual conduct with another person under 18.” Geilenfeld is accused of traveling to the country between November 2006 and December 2010, when he was operating the St. Joseph’s Home for Boys in Port-au-Prince. He founded the orphanage in 1985.

The alleged sex-tourism offense, investigated by Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI, carries a possible sentence of up to 30 years in prison.

Musician Samuel Vekeman was adopted from Congo as a toddler with a hereditary disease. He made a play about it with Dimitri Leue. “Ban international adoption? No, it saved my life.”

Sam Renascent is the stage name of musician and producer Samuel Vekeman (30), aka “the Antwerp reincarnation of Kanye West and Stromae”. There is a special meaning behind it. “Renascent comes from the Latin verb renascere which means 'to be reborn',” Vekeman explains. “I see my adoption as a rebirth. In Congo I might never have been able to turn my passion into a profession. Here I was given the opportunity to build a new life and I am very grateful for that.”

As a drummer and actor, Vekeman has often appeared on stage with his mentor Dimitri Leue (49). Now the duo is making a theater performance together for the first time. One of the first about adoption in Flanders, they claim. In Loos , in which actresses Clara Cleymans and Inge Paulussen also play, the life of a couple with a fervent desire to have children intertwines with that of a sister and her adopted brother, who take stock after the death of their father. Copywriter Leue talked to numerous adoptive parents and children. At what price can you tear a child away from his homeland? And can the love between parent and child ever truly transcend the blood bond?

It has become a piece that Vekeman would have liked to have seen when he was 16, to better understand why he always felt “between two worlds”. Not from here, but not from there either. When he was 2, he was given up by his parents in Kinshasa. He ended up with a warm family in the Catholic community of Sant'Egidio in Antwerp. The man who took him to Belgium by plane disappeared at the airport with the northern sun ("I was his one-way ticket to Europe"). But otherwise, Vekeman's story bears little resemblance to the abuses that made the news in the autumn, when it emerged that several Ethiopian children had not been voluntarily given up and that there were errors in their files. In anticipation of the new adoption decree, Minister of Welfare Hilde Crevits (CD&V) imposed an intercountry adoption stop .

Dimitri Leue and Samuel Vekeman have worked together before. — © Ksenia Kuleshova

She is second mother to 14 Indian girls nobody else wanted and she sold her house in the USA to be able to raise them to adulthood. "My girls are doing so well," she says. She wears a sari but her Jewish identity grew stronger in the Hindu country.

Dr. Michelle Harrison just celebrated her 80th birthday, surrounded by the 14 girls she is raising in Kolkata, India and the dedicated staff who are helping her. Four of these abandoned girls are now young adults preparing to embark upon professional careers.

How does a Jewish doctor born in New York City end up running a home in India for girls nobody else wanted, I ask, unoriginally, at the beginning of our Zoom conversation.

“In my generation, there were lots of people entranced by India -- and I wasn’t one of them,” she answers, impishly raising her shoulders and smiling.

Harrison never retired. A family doctor, psychiatrist, and OB-GYN, she was involved in President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty program, The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, taught at Harvard, Rutgers, and the University of Pittsburgh, and served as Worldwide Director of Medical Affairs for the Johnson & Johnson’s (J&J) Consumer Division and then as Executive Director of J&J’s Institute for Children. Following a break to recover from cancer, fate conspired to bring her to India to raise girls rejected for adoption, six of them severely disabled.

EXAMINATIONIN ADOPTION CASESMEANING IIFROM THE MINISTRY OF JUSTICEADOPTION COMMITTEE