Keep an eye on SBS' discussion program Insight some time in October, when the issue of adults who were adopted from foreign countries as children will be examined, including the story of Canberra man Rohan Samara.

Rohan first spoke to The Canberra Times about his life experience back in mid-2017. He was just three-month-old and malnourished when he was brought to Australia from Vietnam in a cardboard box in 1975 as part of Operation Babylift, in the dying days of the Vietnam war.

Rohan was adopted by an Australian couple, grew up in a loving family and thrived in Canberra, where he is a fire safety officer at The Canberra Hospital and a well-known community figure through his volunteer work with the rural fire service, Burns Club board and as chair of body corporate of the 355-unit Southport complex in Greenway.

Yet, Rohan still wanted to learn about his birth parents and is still searching for the answers. Insight gave him some pause to think, again, about his adoption story and how he was the same - and very different - to the other adoptees.

"When Insight made a call-out via their social media and my friend suggested I should make contact," Rohan said.

"Mother Teresa saved me from the bin"

Mother Teresa saved his life. Born in a slum of Mumbai in India, Emmanuel Leclercq later grew up with adoptive parents in France. In an interview with katholisch.de he talks about his life story and tells why he wants to become a priest today.

Question: When you were a baby, Mother Teresa rescued you in a slum in Bombay, now Mumbai, India. What does their canonization mean to you?

Emmanuel Leclercq: I thank God for that. Because in this war-torn world, the Church gives us a figure of peace. Mother Teresa is truly an example of the peace and love of man she has shown to everyone. She is a model of charity and above all of mercy. She is the figure of God's mercy. She helped people and gave them back their human dignity. She personally gave back my dignity: ten days after my birth, she pulled me out of a trash can and took me to the orphanage of the sisters.

Question: When did you hear about this story?

A Swabian from India

The Bietigheim chef Krishna Bruhn comes from a children's home in India. German parents adopted him at the age of seven.

November 1981: Krishna Bruhn is born in Calcutta, India, in one of Mother Teresa's children's homes. He is seven months old when his German parents adopt him. With them he grows up in Freudental, today he lives in Bietigheim. He hardly remembers the time in India, it has only been a small part of his life. He is aware of his origins: "My parents played with open cards from the start, so there would have been nothing to hide." He knew nothing about his birth parents. It is difficult to get information from the children's homes in India. He has never tried.

At the age of 15, the 33-year-old began training as a cook in a Bietigheimer restaurant. Since then, he has been drawn to the city again and again. At the local "Lama Bar," Bruhn was a chef for over ten years. There he also met his life partner Kathrin Neubauer, "a true Bietigheimerin," as he proudly tells. With Neubauer he leads since December last year, the restaurant "Henry's" in the Bietigheim city center, Hauptstraße 54. The place they have named after Bruhn's middle name, which still comes from the children's home in Calcutta.

He has not been to India since those days. Although he is interested in a trip to his country of birth, but so far he had lacked the means and the energy that brought a reappraisal of his past with it. In addition Neubauer and Bruhn are expecting their first child, a son. "Of course he will be born in Bietigheim," he says with a smile.

The home where everything started

Cologne / New Delhi At the end of the 1980s, a couple from the Westerwald had the courage to adopt a child from India. At the age of 28, Mario Tony Rötzel visited the orphanage where his mother left him for the first time.

In January 1989, a young Indian woman gives birth to a son. A baby with whom the probably unmarried woman feels overwhelmed. A baby she can not or will not keep. In New Delhi she is looking for a place where loving hands take care of her child. She knocks on the Mother Teresa Missionaries of Charity orphanage, handing the infant, Tony, a few days, into the hands of the nuns. And then she leaves without leaving her name. That's why this is not the story of the young woman, but that of Mario Tony Rötzel.

28 years later the day has come. He had always felt that yearning to return to the place where it all began. He had pushed the journey for a long time. Because he was well in Breitscheidt, the small Rhineland-Palatinate village in which he was allowed to grow up. Because he had friends and could play football. Because he studied and found a job in Cologne. "Before my 30th birthday, I really wanted to go to India."

Mario Rötzel is no fuss to note. Neither at Cologne Central Station or at Frankfurt Airport, nor nine hours later, when the young man in New Delhi enters Indian soil again. He is wearing a cap, black T-shirt, sunglasses. The fact that he wears socks in his sandals could have been an indication of his origin. Nevertheless, the employees at the airport ask for their documents in the local language Hindi.

The contact has never broken off since 2011

Steinheim - Manfred Fischer leafs through an illustrated book. In it you can see the gardens of an Indian hotel. According to their clothes, people of different nations have gathered. Fischer points to a photo and explains: "On this staircase there was the first meeting". His wife Hildegard sits with him on the terrace in her apartment in Steinheim - and Rajeena Pflug, her very special guest, is also there.

The Indian woman is a bit exhausted from the long journey from her homeland. Memories are still exchanged on the Montaga. Manfred Fischer's eyes sparkle as he tells of his trip. It was 2011 when he boarded the plane to Mumbai together with Axel Hammer, Robert Seinitz and Bernd Ehmann. For over 50 years, India's largest city has been Stuttgart's twinned city. Once a year Andreas Lapp organizes the wine festival "Stuttgart meets Mumbai" in Mumbai.

With their two harmonicas, a guitar and a baritone, the four Swabians were allowed to help shape the program through traditional folk music. "I was totally fascinated by the land and the people", Fischer enthuses about the former Bombay. Curious he had every opportunity to talk with locals sought. "Rajeena spoke German", which of course made the communication easier. In addition, Fischer was baffled by her name. "My wife's maiden name is also plow".

He soon learned that the Indian had German adoptive parents and spent her childhood in North Rhine-Westphalia. At the age of eleven, she moved with her parents to her home country, where she attended international schools and subsequently studied. "When I met Manfred, I was employed at the German Consulate," says the 49-year-old Rajeena Pflug in perfect German.

Bavarian beauty with Indian roots

The Kissinger actress Sushila Sara Mai was adopted from an orphanage in Calcutta. On many television appearances, she benefits from her dialect.

Admits is the actress Sushila Sara Mai from the ZDF series "Marie catches fire" or "She seeks him" with Thekla Carola Wied. The Kissingerin was also in front of the camera for the "Kluftingerkrimis" "heart blood" and patron saint ". "I was very proud that I was allowed to play in two Klufting Crimes," says Sushila Sara Mai, who looks refreshingly normal with her jeans and yellow T-shirt. She is also proud that she made it to third place in the competition for the White Sausage Queen title in 2018 (we reported back then).

The 40-year-old with dark eyes is German - but her Indian roots are not to be missed. She lived until the age of three in an orphanage in Calcutta, which was headed by Mother Theresa. The Kissingerin even has some concrete memories of the nun, such as in her very Spartan decorated room.

How Sushila Mai came to Kissing

Between Germany and India

Anna Mangala Bhandari is 38 years old and has spent her life in Hesse and Bavaria, where she runs an Indian restaurant together with her Indian husband. She was born in India, but she had to laboriously research her place of birth. She did not know him for a long time, because at the age of three she was adopted scoliosis by two German women - a pediatrician and a pediatric nurse - and came to Germany.

A Hollywood movie is the catalyst for Anna Mangala's 35th birthday to find her origins. She does that with her husband, who is so many steps ahead of her.

German:

Anna Mangala Bhandari ist 38 Jahre alt und hat ihr Leben in Hessen und Bayern verbracht, wo sie heute zusammen mit ihrem indischen Mann ein indisches Restaurant führt. Geboren ist sie in Indien, aber ihren Geburtsort hat sie erst mühsam recherchieren müssen. Sie kannte ihn lange Zeit nicht, denn mit drei Jahren wurde sie skoliosekrank von zwei deutschen Frauen - einer Kinderärztin und einer Kinderkrankenschwester - adoptiert und kam nach Deutschland.

Special invitation for Isabel Hövels: The 29-year-old from Emsdetten will visit Bishop Felix Genn on Thursday. The background: The hairdresser and make-up specialist was adopted at the age of six months by a German couple from an orphanage of the Missionaries of Charity in India. For decades she tried, with the help of her adoptive parents and friends in vain to locate her birth mother. She always bounced off a wall of silence in the religious community. When Bishop Felix Genn wrote a letter to the Mother Superior of the Sisters in India in 2015, everything suddenly went very fast. A few weeks later she held all the important information in her hand.

"I am infinitely grateful to the bishop for having worked so successfully for me," says Hövels. But she also wondered how it could be, "that the sisters in India have been masonry for years and suddenly give out everything just because a bishop asks." Her picture of the church had been badly damaged in the years before. Again and again she was rejected and comforted. She learned of irregularities in the mediation of Indian infants by the sisters, of money that flowed illegally and of missing consent from parents.

New view of the church

Also about this Hövels wants to talk to the bishop. Recent developments have also opened up a new view of the church for her, she says, "If the system has mistakes, then it is individual people in the church who do much good."

To these people belong for them the Indian priest Father Theo Kindo, at that time in the Pastoralteam of the St. Nicomedes municipality in Borghorst, which intervened both as an interpreter as well as travel companion and connoisseur of the church landscape in its homeland. And the Osnabrück general vicar Theo Paul, who made important contacts as a friend of his uncle and also traveled to India to help. He was the one who made contact with Bishop Felix Genn. He then turned to today's Superior General of the Missionaries of Charity, Sister Mary Prema Pierick. She comes from the Westphalian Reken.

Time Travel: Orphans for Africa

Ruth is seven years old when she has to leave Germany. Together with 82 other children, she had been chosen for a new life. South Africans had achieved that the youth welfare offices selected Schleswig-Holstein's children for the "Dietse Kinderfond". This was an organization of right-wing Boers. Their motives for the adoption were compassion, desire for children and also the idea of ??"white blood" to strengthen their own position in apartheid.

State government gives the green light for adoption

The request of the organization was even on the agenda of a Cabinet meeting of the Schleswig-Holstein state government. As a result, the ministers actually voted in favor of the collective adoption of German children to South Africa. In Lübeck, they were checked for health and vaccinated, in 1948 they boarded an English ship and drove with him to the other side of the world. When Ruth arrived in Cape Town, she had nothing with her except a vaccination certificate. Everything else had been lost on the journey. A vaccination certificate with her name and an ocher dress, that's all. With that she started her new life.

Long way from Kolberg over Lübeck to South Africa

Ukrainian surrogate mother is legal mother of the child

A Ukrainian carries a child out for a couple from NRW. The registry office in Kiev registers the Germans as parents, genetically they are. The BGH decides differently.

According to German law, a woman can not register as a mother of her child, who has been delivered by a Ukrainian surrogate mother, to the registry office. Only one adoption is possible, as emerges from a published resolution of the Karlsruhe Federal Court of Justice (BGH). (Az. XII ZB 530/17)

A German couple from North Rhine-Westphalia, whose child had been delivered by a Ukrainian surrogate mother, had filed a suit. Surrogacy is prohibited in Germany.

The BGH referred in this connection to a provision in the Civil Code. Thus, the mother of a child is "the woman who gave birth". The Karlsruhe judges confirmed with their decision a decision of the Higher Regional Court Hamm.