Born and abandoned in Mumbai, reborn in Sweden, Erika Sandberg says she is Indian on the outside, but feels Swedish on the inside.

Rediff.com's Vaihayasi Pande Daniel narrates her tale.

Illustration: Dominic Xavier/Rediff.com

In August 1976, a Swissair jet flew out of the monsoon skies of Bombay, due west, with a precious little bundle onboard.

The Boeing was headed for Zurich. In Switzerland probably another air hostess took careful charge of this special delivery as she boarded a flight headed to Stockholm.

''October 2009. I am thrilled to say that Mogilino Social Care Home has now been closed. It has been a journey and a half, but it has been incredibly rewarding to watch the impacts of the film Bulgaria's Abandoned Children rippling out, globally and within Bulgaria too.

When the film first went out in 2007 it created an international outcry, with viewers forming strong petitions targeted at MPs and the European Parliament demanding change for the disabled, hidden away in Bulgaria's barren institutes.

Other viewers raised money, gathered clothing and toys together - to deliver to specific institutes in Bulgaria - and for some, the agony of the children's lives was enough to take

them on a flight over to Bulgaria to physically offer their professional skills to help the children and the staff.

When the film screened in Bulgaria, the local media descended on Mogilino asking questions. Soon Bulgarian television screened The Magnificent Six, a series of celebrity driven shows to raise money - which they donated to UNICEF to build Small Group Homes for the children and young people of Mogilino.

Mogilino is closed

September 2007. More than seventy children. Suddenly it was world news. The children with an intellectual disability - or something similar to it - were grossly neglected. I wrote about it in early November 2007 after my visit to Bulgaria. In February 2008, State Secretary Frans Timmermans went to Bulgaria to offer help. We are now two years later.

Mogilino is closed and the children are divided into five homes in four cities. In the city of Russe, Child & Space is active in a small-scale shelter for eight of the children who once lived in Mogilino. Thanks to Unicef ??and the money from various sources, including a large text messaging campaign in Bulgaria itself, the children were able to go from Mogilino to the new small-scale shelters.

Vessela Banova from Child & Space visited me today. The attention has disappeared and Unicef ??too. At the beginning of 2008 Mogilino was mentioned once on the Frans Timmermans weblog. Then no more. Child & Space must arrange everything for 3,500 Euro per year per child. Accommodation is arranged, but staff and care are worth ten euros a day. A day out? No money. Pampers? No money.

Mogilino was not a humanitarian crisis. A humanitarian disaster. And as Robert van Voren from GIP (Global Initiative on Psychiatry) wrote on my weblog early 2008:

Shareable Link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1SAgaAqjcL-4BVZjHcNjgZphg7fjYk_a_

GUWAHATI: A woman, Rajini who was born in Assam but now lives in Belgium is searching for her biological mother.

In a video posted on YouTube, she narrates her story and is being shared on many social media applications.

She wrote on a Facebook page that she was born in Tezpur, Assam, on the 24th of February, 1983. Four days later, someone bought her to the orphanage, Missionaries of Charity in Tezpur also known as the Orphanage of Mother Theresa. She lived there for a year and then was moved to Kolkata’s Shishu Bhavan orphanage. At the age of 2, she was adopted and now has lived in Belgium for 33 years.

She said that she is not sure if her mother gave her up or if her mother even knows that Rajini is alive. She said she does not even know the truth and that for her entire life, she thought she was an orphan. Even her adoptive parents thought that she was an orphan as no information was available about Rajini’s biological family.

She said that for the past two years, she has been writing to the orphanage and the adoption agency and recently, she got some positive news. Listed below is the information shared by her:

HYDERABAD: Abandoned by her parents soon after birth, four-year-old intersex child, Nitya (name changed), has finally found

a home — miles away in the United States of America. According to officials of the state’s women and child welfare department

(WCWD), this is the first time that a LGBTQ+ child has been adopted from Telangana

(https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Telangana).

Nitya’s American parents are based in Washington DC. “The child moved in with her adoptive parents a few months ago. The

A global story about the adopted Danish-Ethiopian teenage girl Amy, who decides to reclaim her lost identity and fight against the adoption system.

Ethiopian Amy left her home when she was 9 years old and declared fit to be adopted by a Danish family. But Amy never felt at home in Denmark, and now she is dreaming of having the authorities' decision reversed, so she can return home to her biological family. The film about her follows five dramatic years from when she is 13 to when she turns 18, and is an intimate tale about the systematic violation of children's rights that take place in the international adoption system - seen through the eyes of a teenager. Amy has a burning desire to repair the family ties that were broken from one day to the next almost 10 years ago. But Amy does not only miss her mother and sisters, she also misses her language and her culture. 'Amy's Will' is a powerful, personal story of a single woman's determination to decide about her young life, but also a story about what role culture and biological origins play in our identity.

Screenings

Date Time Location

Thu. 21/03

Associate Professor Sonja Van Wichelen, sociologist and leader of the Biohumanity FutureFix research project in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences made the call in a paper published in the latest issue of Law and Society Review.

In the paper, Associate Professor Van Wichelen argues that the world of international adoption today is undergoing profound changes and that legal systems and processes have been unable to catch up.

Over a period of five years, Associate Professor Van Wichelen conducted fieldwork in the United States and the Netherlands, where she visited a number of adoption agencies and conducted in-depth interviews and ethnographic research.

One key aspect of her research was an examination of the impact of the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, which was established in 1993 and sets out the international principles that govern intercountry adoption.

"The Convention does have an important role to play in ensuring the protection of the child and combating illegal and unethical adoptions," Associate Professor Van Wichelen said.

PUNE: The state has reported 32 deaths from 32 adoption agencies, data for three years from 2016-19 submitted by the

Women and Child Development Department show. As many as 776 deaths were reported in the country. The highest, 124 deaths, were from Uttar Pradesh. The Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) has sought detailed explanations on the cause of deaths. Last month, responding to a question in Lok Sabha (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Lok-Sabha), women and child development (WCD) minister Smriti Irani put out the data which said the highest number of deaths of children have been in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/bihar), Maharashtra (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/maharashtra) and Telengana.

The cause of death, facilities provided at these agencies and the various issues plaguing these agencies will be taken up after the agencies provide a detailed report, officials from CARA said. Action has been initiated in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Telangana (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Telangana) where they have got the state machinery to shut down these agencies and even fine some for poor maintenance. A detailed report will be sought for Maharashtra. The state has 63 adoption agencies, the highest in the country. “We have had to close down two agencies in Uttar Pradesh and in Telengana we had to fine them for non-maintenance. Action against others will follow,’’ officials said. CARA officials said the state agencies must monitor the agencies in their jurisdiction and report to them. The government has made registration of all agencies compulsory. Over 8,000 adoption agencies are registered with the respective authorities for monitoring.

Senior officials from the WCD department said the government was all set to bring in amendments in the Juvenile Justice Act in the last Lok Sabha session. When amended it will make the district magistrate the competent officer for approving adoptions instead of the civil courts. The ministry says it will prevent long delays in courts and expedite adoption. “We will be reintroducing the amendment in the upcoming session and plan to bring in an amendment to the JJ Act for making the district magistrate and collector as the competent officer for approving adoptions, instead of courts,’’ they said. With the civil courts already burdened with huge number of pending cases, matters such as adoption keep getting delayed. On the other hand, district magistrates or district collectors have access to all departments will find it easier to seek documents or verify facts on the ground faster.

WICHITA, Kan. (KAKE) -

For Gina Schneider, a global gamble paid off in every way she could have imagined.

“It’s just a question mark, I couldn’t answer it,” she said.

At a young age, she was adopted from the country of Romania. She grew up with the only parent she knew – Doctor Stephen Schneider and his wife Linda.

Both of whom were convicted nearly a decade ago, when prosecutors accused them of running a ‘pill mill’ operation. They’re both serving sentences for illegally prescribing opioids to patients.