Limburgsch dagblad

10-01-1990

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This piece originally appeared in the now-defunct Gazillion Voices in August 2014 when the writer was in her fifth year of living in Seoul. It has been updated seven years later in August 2021, four-and-a-half years after leaving Seoul, to reflect the passage of time etc.

*The image above is from Holt Heritage Camp at Camp Lane in Oregon 1986. Stacey, Kim, and Tara are seated 4th row up; 2nd, 3rd, 4th in from the left

I carry with me a bundle of letters. A bundle of letters that I have carried with me every place I have lived in this world – from Lake Worth to London to Mittersill to Vilnius to Minneapolis to Seoul to Portland and to every city/country in between. In this bundle, which I always keep in a place so that if there is a fire I can save them, are letters from Tara Bilyeu Footner.

Tara and I met when we were 9 and attending Holt Heritage Camp in Oregon for the first time in the summer of ’86.

We became lifelong pen pals, and I would dare to say, some 36 years later, we are lifelong friends.

For years, Ling Dong didn’t want to find his parents. In 1999, he was abducted from Shanghai while his grandmother wasn’t paying attention. At the age of four, he was taken across the country to the southwestern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Like thousands of other Chinese children, he had been trafficked to be sold to childless — or sonless — couples.

But growing up, Ling was told his biological parents had abandoned and sold him. He developed a hatred for them. In recent years, as child abductions have become rare in China, the country’s thousands of victims are trying to find their biological roots aided by a national DNA database. But Ling didn’t feel a need to start searching until, in 2019, his curiosity got the better of him.

The following is his account, which he shared on the condition of using a pseudonym:

I was abducted in the fall of 1999. I only remember being taken to Guangxi by a man, first by train, then by boat, and in the end being carried into the mountains on his back. He used a large leaf to scoop mountain water for me to drink. When I cried, he played hide-and-seek with me and warned that the police would arrest me if I didn’t quiet down.

I arrived at a remote place, where “mom and dad” were waiting for me. There were small rivers, mountains, trees, and chickens and ducks. My original home did not have these things, so I was both scared and curious.

When Cierra Simon looks back on her life, she has many questions and very few answers.

“There was a complete alienation … because of their actions,” she said.

Simon was taken into foster care in Ontario when she was six and a Saskatchewan family adopted her when she was nine. While she acknowledges she needed to be separated from her parents, she said the choices made for her resulted in her becoming homeless and unaware of her First Nations heritage.

She believes the system needs to change and told Global News the effects of adoption will always be a part of her.

Simon was born in Kingston 28 years ago. She lived with her parents, who she said struggled with addictions, and then with her grandparents. She recalls that her grandparents were overwhelmed with raising the then-six-year-old Simon and her two younger sisters, so the girls were transferred to the care of Dave and Deb Carter, a foster family in Bracebridge, Ont.

n July and August, editor-in-chief Jozefien Daelemans and Editor-in-Chief Anouk Torbeyns alternate weekly in a new series of summer columns. This week: Anouk who wants to reflect on her first mom on this second Mother's Day. Photo: Sarah Van Looy

Today the mothers are celebrated in the province, more specifically in the diocese, Antwerp. While we always look at the people of Antwerp with a crooked eye because they can't just do 'normal' and celebrate Mother's Day in May like all the rest, a Mother's Day on Our Lady of Ascension actually seems more logical. People then commemorate and celebrate Mary, the primeval mother – at least in Catholic culture – the mother of mothers.

As an Antwerp immigrant with a mother who does not live on the territory, I still celebrated Mother's Day in May in recent years and I did nothing special on August 15. I want to change that starting this year. I want to use this second Mother's Day to honor my first, popularly called 'organic', mother. Because no matter how unconditional the care and love of my adoptive mom is, my first mother never really got a prominent place in my personal adoption story. Wrongly, I now know.

“My first mother never really got a prominent place in my adoption story. Wrongly, I now know.”

When I look back on it now, I was taught from an early age to subtly distance myself from my birth mother because, for whatever reason, she gave me up too. Not entirely illogical, of course. With an adoption, your environment tries to do everything possible so that you attach yourself to your new environment and family as quickly as possible. Everyone has done their best to create a warm nest, to receive me with open arms and to make me feel at home, blood ties or not. I don't suspect anyone of bad intentions. Today, however, I dare to doubt whether it was the best approach.

HYDERABAD: In what would appear to be a script of a popular Bollywood potboiler of the 1970s, three siblings who got lost four years ago in Hyderabad were reunited this week, thanks to a chance selfie and a DNA test.

Daughters of a knife sharpener of Kukatpaly, Aishwarya (12) Akhila (11) and Asha (7) suddenly found themselves all alone during the summer of 2017 when their father died of a heart attack and their heartbroken mother, a daily wager, disappeared.

A few locals chanced upon Aishwarya and Akhila and took them to an orphanage at Ameenpur, while Asha was rescued by her grandmother from the streets

“She used to take Asha to a shrine at Kukatpally for begging and in 2020, she also died. Asha was handed over to local police and they in turn shifted her to the child care institution (CCI) at Yousufguda,” said district welfare officer, Hyderabad, P Akkeshwar Rao.

Meanwhile, both Aishwarya and Akhila were shifted to an orphanage run by an NGO called ‘Helping Hands Humanity’ (HHH) at

AHMEDABAD: Had they been even 24 hours late in finding out that their

nanny was a fraud, a family from Chandkheda would have lost their infant

to an interstate child trafficking ring. The nursemaid they had employed

this May had plotted to kidnap and sell the 11-month-old baby girl to a

couple in Pune.

This year, the legislation on child adoption has undergone a number of changes, including changes to the extension of the validity of the adopter certificate and the introduction of more debureaucratization measures in the adoption procedure. Then, in order to reflect all the changes that have taken place this year, the authorities on Wednesday published the new models of documents used in the procedure for adopting children, including the certificate of person or family fit to adopt, the application for assessment and the application of international adoption.

Order of the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection no. 1,430 / 2021, published on Wednesday in the Official Gazette no. 774, contains new models of documents used in the adoption procedure .

Specifically, the normative act contains the new model of:

the certificate of a person or family fit to adopt;

the request for evaluation in order to issue the certificate of person / family able to adopt;

A medical tech company in east China is under investigation on suspicion that it's a front for an illegal baby-trafficking business, the city of Weifang's Public Security Bureau said.

Local police arrested the company's head on Monday after anti-trafficking advocate Shangguan Zhengyi conducted a sting operation with the help of Xia Ruchu from The Paper, a Shanghai news outlet.

The suspect, a woman in her 40s identified as Sister Zhu, is accused of connecting clients who wanted to be parents with pregnant Chinese women looking to sell off their newborns, Xia reported.

A newborn may be sold for as much as $20,000 in the area, said Xia, who helped Shangguan with his investigation. Zhu served as the middleman for these transactions and said she was consulted by 20 to 30 clients a year, The Paper said.

She also offered to help buyers arrange birth certificates for the babies and had a system of swapping the names of her pregnant customers to muddle documentation of the birth, the report said. The goal was to ensure the baby's biological parents couldn't find and reclaim their child if they ever changed their minds.