Romanian reunion with a birth mother thought dead

Publication date: 30 November 2014

News / GTA

“The Romanian government stole and sold me,” says Canadian-reared woman who finds the parent she was told was dead.

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Andreea Beanland, left, wears a basmas, a traditional Romanian head scarf, given to her by her birth mother, Cocuta Buzatu, right.

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FAMILY PHOTO

Andreea Beanland, left, wears a basmas, a traditional Romanian head scarf, given to her by her birth mother, Cocuta Buzatu, right.

By: Manisha Krishnan Staff Reporter, Published on Sun Nov 30 2014

Andreea Beanland’s 25th birthday was a low-key affair. A handful of relatives threw a barbecue, offering her champagne and a modest gift — shampoo and body wash.

Still, when it came time to blow out the candles on her chocolate sponge cake, the Toronto resident was stumped. Her wish had already come true — for the first time since she was born Nov. 16, 1989, she was celebrating the occasion with her mother.

“I cried, and it’s not easy to make me cry,” she told the Star from her mom’s home in Hunedoara-Timisana, Romania, a poor western village of about 300.

“I’m kind of a tough person.”

Weeks after she was born in the commune of Jamu Mare, Beanland now understands she was taken from hospital without her mother’s consent. Stolen, in her words.

Her mother says she was told her daughter had died of pneumonia.

A year later, a Canadian couple adopted her from an orphanage and raised her in the small town of Qu’Appelle, Sask.

Beanland located her birth family earlier year this year, uncovering troubling facts about her past in the process. Much of the information in her adoption papers is wrong — including her birth date, listed as Nov. 23, 1989, her father’s identity and the spelling of her mother’s name.

The birth certificate given to her adoptive parents doesn’t match up with the one her birth mother possesses; it has no serial number and her birth parents aren’t named. (The Star has viewed the documents.)

“The Romanian government stole and sold me,” said Beanland. “(My mom) did not sign my papers; she still has my birth certificate, and those are the two things you need to be adopted.”

Her adoptive mother, Pat Beanland, told the Star the adoption was facilitated by the Saskatchewan government and that she and her husband never suspected there was anything illicit about it.

The incorrect spelling of Beanland’s birth mother’s name, Cocuta Buzatu, as “Coeuta Buzatu,” nearly thwarted her reunification efforts. In August, after posting her story in Facebook groups for Romanian adoptees, someone suggested double-checking it. She got a hit.

“I knew that had to be her because I look like her,” said Beanland.

“I messaged her my story and the next day she responded, saying, ‘Yes, I am your mother.’”

BEANLAND WAS born into turmoil.

She was Buzatu’s 10th child, her final one with a man prone to drunken fits of violence, particularly when his wife was pregnant.

“He would try to hurt her to get rid of the child,” said Beanland.

Under communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, all forms of contraceptives were forbidden. Tens of thousands of babies were deserted, institutionalized, adopted. A revolution that eventually overthrew Ceausescu broke out in late 1989, adding to the chaos. About 700 babies came to Canada from 1990-1991, according to researchers.

Buzatu, a petite woman with a cherubic face, moved to a farm in Jamu Mare after her husband kicked her and the kids out of their home.

When Beanland came, on a warm autumn night, she wasn’t ready. She gave birth crouched over a laundry basket.

“My mother cut the umbilical cord and the ambulance arrived,” said Beanland.

In early December, the baby developed pneumonia and was taken back to the hospital in the nearby town of Deta. Her sister Petronela, then 4, who has epilepsy as well as a learning disability, was admitted around the same time.

Buzatu travelled back and forth between the farm, where she had left the other kids, and the hospital. About two weeks in, she arrived to find her two daughters missing.

“She was told that she could not take Petronela home because she had to be institutionalized,” said Beanland. As for the newborn, “They told her I was dead,” said Beanland. “They told her they couldn’t prove it because they put my body in an incinerator.”

Then, 11 years ago, Buzatu received a letter in the mail informing her that Petronela was in fact in a psychiatric hospital. The family, who assumed Petronela had died, picked her up that same day, said Beanland.

“After they found Petronela, she thought maybe Andreea is still alive.”

PAT AND BRUCE BEANLAND had been trying to adopt a child in Canada for years when Pat opened the door officially to international children. It was such a long shot, she said, that she didn’t bother telling Bruce.

“I really never thought much about it.” That was spring of 1990. In August, she got a call from Saskatchewan social services.

“They asked us if we wanted to go to Romania to adopt a baby,” said Pat.

The Saskatchewan government did not confirm or deny its role in the adoption, but said the province wasn’t required to keep records on internationally adopted children at the time.

Pat tracked down her husband, who was on the road working for Canadian Pacific Railway, and explained the situation.

“His response was ‘Where the hell is Romania?’”

After deliberating for a few hours — they had to respond within a day — Bruce agreed. Less than a month later, he was on a flight to Romania, along with four potential adoptive mothers and a provincial employee. Pat stayed at home with the couple’s 7-year-old daughter, Tracy.

Bruce was taken to a hospital — a makeshift orphanage, said Pat — in Deta. The conditions, as Bruce described them, were “disgusting,” she said: decrepit cribs with urine-soaked mattresses.

“The kids were brought out one at a time.”

At 11 months old, Buzatu’s baby was second youngest in the group.

“She had scabies very bad and had never eaten (solid) food. She had only had bottle formula,” said Pat. “She had never had a bath.”

Bruce phoned home to say he wasn’t leaving without the baby girl.

“She had eyes the size of saucers, huge, huge brown eyes,” said Pat. “He was brokenhearted.”

They were told her parents had abandoned her. (They would later search for her parents, but had no luck.) It took about a month to get the paperwork sorted out, with Bruce, out of necessity, bribing officials to expedite the process.

At her new home, the baby had screaming tantrums and slept terribly. It carried on into her teens.

“The older I got, I really struggled with my identity,” said Beanland, who was told her birth parents had probably died in the revolution. Without seeing a death certificate, she grew skeptical. After moving to Toronto this year to pursue filmmaking, she picked up the search.

“SEEING THE WORDS, ‘Yes, I am your mother,’ shook me hard. Literally.”

It was 2 a.m. in Toronto on Aug. 19 when Beanland received that Facebook message. She didn’t sleep for the next 32 hours.

Beanland and her mother have come a long way since that first conversation, painfully executed with the help of Google translator.

She arrived in Romania on Nov. 11, after visiting three of her sisters in Ireland, and now spends her time helping with the family farm animals — a couple of goats and pigs — and practising her Romanian.

“Frumoasa (beautiful) mama,” she said, wolf-whistling in jest as a freshly made-up Buzatu settled next to her on the couch for a Skype interview with the Star.

The resemblance is clear — they share the same cheeks and smile. Despite the language barrier, the pair seemed at ease with one another, giggling often.

“I’m at home,” said Beanland. She wondered how many fellow adoptees will never find their roots.

Ronald Federici, a Virginia-based neuropsychologist who founded Care for Children International, estimated that only five to 10 per cent of the 6,000 Romanian adoptions that took place in the early 1990s were legal. It wasn’t uncommon for adoptive parents, like the Beanlands, to be lied to, he said.

“There were no adoption laws” in the country, said Federici, who considers himself an “honorary Romanian” and has five adopted Romanian children. His centre specializes in helping internationally adopted children with psychiatric disorders.

“Often the families were forced to give up the children,” he said. “It was a disaster zone, and people were buying and selling kids left and right.”

In May 1993, Canada and more than 60 other countries implemented The Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, a framework to regulate overseas adoptions.

Beanland remains in close contact with her adoptive parents, and has their support.

“I hope she finds whatever it is she is missing,” said Pat.

She is now working on obtaining Romanian citizenship, and hopes to pursue a psychology degree in Arad, a city of about 165,000 near her mom. She is also crowdfunding to support Buzatu, who lives in a two-bedroom bungalow with no running water.

“I want to spend the rest of her life getting to know her,” she said. “This is my blood, this is what I’ve always dreamed of.”