Nonprofit overcomes previous group's mental health obstacles to publish translation of doctor's memoir

After recovering from a series of setbacks, a new Oregon City-based nonprofit organization for adoptees has bounced back by publishing the memoir of an award-winning Korean doctor and continuing to support people of Korean descent in the United States.

Canby resident Jodi Gill, who serves as president of the new Adoptee Group, has traveled to Korea over a dozen times and has had the opportunity to visit the orphanage where she lived before being adopted in April 1976. Previously, Gill served on the board of the Gide Foundation, an organization with the same mission that had to dissolve due to the mental health conditions of two of its co-founders, one of whom was identified as misappropriating funds.

Gill said that mental health conditions and addiction among Korean-American adoptees is unfortunately common, and it's estimated that 20% of them struggle with these symptoms on a daily basis.

"Despite the mental health disruptions, the co-founders hold a place of value and respect for where we are today," Gill said. "The Adoptee Group is fulfilling what the Gide Foundation wanted to accomplish at a turbo speed despite the setbacks that come with working in a community where pain lingers."

When Mariel Vos (39) was four months old, she was adopted. When she was eleven she ended up in a foster family, where she lived until she was seventeen. Mariël: “People often expect that everything will be fine in a foster family. But that is not always the case.”

Mariel's adoptive parents were gifted people. They couldn't really take care of her, so Mariel had to deal with mental abuse. “I kept hearing that they regretted adopting me. They thought I was very expensive and wanted more value for money. As a six-year-old girl, I knew exactly what I had cost. I was also beaten by my parents. It was a very tough situation.”

foster care

When Mariel was nine years old, she ended up in day foster care. Out of school, around three o'clock, she went to a foster home and also stayed there for dinner. Then she was taken back to her adoptive parents. “At a certain point I could see the differences between my adoptive parents and me more and more. Actually, I took care of them, instead of them taking care of me. As a child you are very loyal to your parents. I really loved them, they were my mom and dad, even though their upbringing was totally wrong.”

Two years later, Mariel was then eleven years old, she was permanently removed from home. An experience she will never forget. “In the morning my adoptive parents told me that in an hour I would leave for my day foster care family. I totally panicked. I cried and apologized a hundred times for everything I did wrong in life. I so wanted to stay with them. I promised that I would always be sweet and caring. It was a traumatic event. In retrospect, I also think it was a low point in my life.” In the period after that, Mariel suffered from homesickness. She wanted so badly to go back to her parents. “I also noticed that I found it very difficult to act on the love of the foster family. These people were nice, but I was scared to death for doing something wrong. I was afraid that I would have to leave again.”

This article is the 32nd in a series about Koreans adopted abroad. Some of the articles of this series will dedicate space to parts of the Amicus Brief submitted to the Korean court by Dr. Lee Kyung-eun. The Amicus Brief was written as a Q&A to assist the judges in understanding the historic meaning of this case. Special mention and appreciation must go to Raymond Ha (M.A. '21, Stanford Univ.), Hyejin Jang (B.A. '21 Princeton Univ.), Do Yon Lena Kwon (J.D. Candidate '22, Penn Law), Hailey M. Lee (J.D. Candidate '24, Penn Law), and Lydia Lim (J.D. '21, Penn Law) for fully translating this 70-page long brief into English as an act of solidarity for the rights of adoptees. ? ED.

By Lee Kyung-eun

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Question: Korea and U.S.' inter-country adoption, which began immediately after the Korean War in the 1950s, increased to the extent that Korea was sending 500 children overseas per month, and 8,000 children per year by the 1980s. Please explain the characteristics of Korea and U.S.' inter-country adoption that led to such a result.

Answer: "Orphan adoption," which originated in Europe post World War II for the emergency rescue of displaced war orphans, became highly systematized in Korea.

Pieter Omtzigt has asked parliamentary questions about Insiya, who was kidnapped in 2016. Her father, Shehzad Hemani, had his daughter kidnapped in 2016 and took her to India, where she still resides, against her mother's will. The questions come at a precarious moment: the Netherlands will receive the Indian president next week.

A year and a half ago, Hemani was sentenced in absentia to nine years in prison for having the girl kidnapped from her grandmother's home in Watergraafsmeer and taken to India illegally. A cousin of Hemani was sentenced to four years in prison for involvement, but he fled abroad.

“The kidnapping was violent and unheard of,” the judge said at the time. “A family life has been destroyed. The effects are difficult to measure. For Insiya's mother, it is a never-ending grieving process. Insiya is also separated from the rest of her family.” India has been asked to extradite Hemani, but has so far refused to do so.

Since Insiya has been in India, her father has stopped contacting her mother Nadia Rashid . The girl's parents were divorced before the kidnapping and had a conflict about parental authority. After the kidnapping, Rashid saw her daughter only a few times via Skype.

State visit

Woman sues IVF clinic for wrongly implanting male - not female - embryo from her wife during IVF: Gave birth to son and likened having male fetus inside her to rape

Heather Wilhelhm-Routenberg and wife Robbie are suing CNY Fertility in Latham, New York

Robbie was originally meant to carry Heather's embryo, but miscarried

Heather then offered to carry Robbie's embryo, with the couple discovering they were expecting a boy at 15 weeks

Heather struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts during the pregnancy, and after giving birth

Dr. Cho's memoir about Korean War orphans, abandoned children will be published in English in May, shedding light on why they were sent overseas to new families

Retired pediatrician Cho Byung-guk, 89, came to understand why some ethnic Korean adoptees search tirelessly for their birth parents and strive to figure out why they were sent overseas to new families, while interacting with numerous adoptees during her five decades of work.

"Every year at Holt Ilsan, we had groups of visitors from overseas. They were adopted by parents mostly in the United States and Europe when they were babies, so most of them don't speak or read Korean," Cho told The Korea Times.

Once their stays ? which could be for days or weeks ? end, there is one thing many of these adoptees do: they buy Cho's 2009 memoir, which is written in Korean.

"Although they don't understand Korean, they purchased the book and took it home with the hope that some of their Korean friends or neighbors could help explain those stories," Cho said.

In Cambodia, Holt’s social work team has helped to develop three care alternatives for children growing up in institutional care — kinship care, foster care and, for the first time, a formal, ethical system of domestic adoption. In March 2021, the first child in Cambodia joined her adoptive family via this new process.

In May 2020, early in the COVID pandemic, a baby girl was born in a hospital in Cambodia. She was small — weighing just over 5 pounds — but her eyes were dark and lovely and shining with light.

A bright new life had just begun.

But for her mom, this was not a day of celebration. As she looked in the eyes of her newborn daughter, she faced a heartbreaking decision.

Unmarried, and separated from the baby’s father, she feared her family’s reaction if she came home with a child. In many communities in Cambodia, the stigma of single motherhood remains alive and well — shaming women for having a child outside of marriage. This newborn girl’s mom had managed to keep her pregnancy a secret from her family. And on the day her daughter was born, she decided to relinquish her parental rights.

NGOs are 'deeply alarmed' by applications pending from the US and Italy without adequate child protection measures in place

Cambodia will shortly resume child adoptions after a decade-long hiatus imposed amid controversy over allegations that not all infants were orphans and some were stolen.

The Social Affairs Ministry has confirmed adoptions are pending to the United States and Italy, raising the alarm among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) seeking child protection norms of international standards.

“We fear these decisions will lead to more families being irreparably torn apart by a poorly regulated system that has failed to protect children’s best interests in the past,” said rights group Licadho in a statement, adding it was “deeply alarmed.”

It said Cambodia sent 3,696 children abroad for adoption between 1998 and 2011 before suspending foreign adoptions following evidence of fraud and corruption.

NEW DELHI: A Delhi court has held that merely because a man happened to be a Muslim and governed by personal laws in various issues like adoption, he cannot be debarred from availing the rights conferred upon him by general and benevolent legislation.

The observations came while granting custody parole to an accused to visit the concerned officer in Nuh, Haryana, for signing the adoption papers. The public prosecutor had opposed the custody parole on the grounds that in Islam, adoption is legally not permissible. He had said that personal laws were applicable in issues related to adoption and that the very ground for custody parole was specious.

Advocate Qausar Khan, appearing for the accused, had argued that under personal laws, adoption was not permissible in Islam but under the provisions of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000, even a Muslim is entitled to adopt a child and the rights of the accused cannot be nagged on the ground that he is facing trial in a case.

Additional sessions judge Dharmender Rana said, “I concur with the defence counsel that merely because the applicant/accused happens to be Muslim and governed by personal laws on various issues, he cannot be debarred from availing the rights conferred upon him by general and benevolent legislation like Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000.”

The court directed the jail superintendent to take the accused on custody parole to the office concerned on April 1 and make all necessary arrangements in this regard.

Imagine if there was someone out there in the world who was your mirror image.

Someone who looked exactly like you, but was a total stranger.

That’s how twin brothers George Skrzynecky and Lucian Poznanski lived their entire lives… as strangers.

The twins hail from Germany and were born in 1946 after their mother Elizabeth, who was a Polish, Catholic, was freed from a labor camp at the end of World War II, according to the BBC.

She became ill after giving birth and was unable to care for them so she had to give them up for adoption. The brothers were then sent to Poland and adopted into different homes.