Een zoektocht in India naar de échte biologische ouders (A search in India for the real biological parents)

Jyoti Weststrate and Regina Schipper have been looking for their biological parents in India for years. Correspondent Aletta André followed part of their search.

Aletta André18 January 2023, 01:00

A middle-aged woman is standing in Jyoti Weststrate's hotel room with some relatives. It is a cheap four-storey hotel in the town of Bettiah in the northern Indian state of Bihar. The music of a wedding in the courtyard can be heard through the window.

The woman looks awkward and confused, and after a while drops off. "It doesn't get through to them, but I'm not who they're looking for," says Weststrate, unsure how to deal with the situation. In her own search for her biological family, she is used to some disappointment. The fact that she also sees the other side of the coin in Bihar, with families of missing children, touches her, but does not take her any further.

'I don't want to die searching'

The scene is exemplary of the difficult, emotional search of adoptees like Weststrate. Information about their own background is very limited and not always correct. And in the country of origin they encounter people with their own traumas and expectations.

The Dutch government wants to assist them better with a center of expertise, for which more than 36 million euros has been allocated. The center of expertise was one of the recommendations of the Joustra committee, which published a report in 2021 on structural abuses in intercountry adoption. Weststrate, a 39-year-old mother of two, doubts whether it will help her. Because there doesn't seem to be more information or money for individual searches (see box).

Regina Schipper, her traveling companion in Bihar, also thinks so. Both were in the same children's home in Bettiah. Schipper, a 44-year-old psychiatrist and mother of two, arrived there in the late 1970s and Weststrate in 1985. For Schipper, after some fifteen trips to India, this is the last time she will attempt to use her biological find family. “I don't want to die searching,” she says. “I think it's important to show my own children that I won't go on forever. Some dilemmas have no solution.”

Regina Schipper shows a local resident in Narkatiaganj, in the Indian state of Bihar, the poster she uses to search for her family. In the background Jyoti Weststrate. Figurine Aletta André

Regina Schipper shows a local resident in Narkatiaganj, in the Indian state of Bihar, the poster she uses to search for her family. In the background Jyoti Weststrate. Image Aletta André

A quest without clues

The two travel for two weeks to all kinds of villages around Bettiah, together with a camera crew that records everything. For example, the two were in a local church to search the archive for possible family names, when Weststrate was recognized by the woman who is in her hotel room later that day. “She thought she recognized me. She called my name. But the Jyoti she's looking for is older than me. It can't be me.”

Weststrate, unlike Schipper, is in Bihar for the first time. One of the first places she visits is the Catholic children's home. No orphans and abandoned children live here anymore. Instead, the nuns take care of deaf and dumb children from the area. “It's a special experience,” she says. “But they don't know anything about adoption. Everything from then is gone. There is only one crib left.”

She doesn't have many leads. The file of her adoption, in 1985 by Dutch parents from Zutphen, consists of only a few pages. This tells her that she was born near Bettiah, that she was about one and a half when she came to the children's home, and that she was found in a church by a Jesuit priest. The enclosed photo shows a somewhat angry-looking child with short, curly hair.

An unprofessional procedure

How do you start a search with such limited information? Both Weststrate and Schipper say they have not received help from authorities in the Netherlands.

In 2017, Schipper and Weststrate approached the widow of the head of the Adoption Mediation Foundation (SBA), the organization that arranged their adoption. She turned out to still have 125 files of adopted children in the attic, including that of Weststrate. As a result, she learned that her parents had adopted another girl, who died a day after arriving in the Netherlands. Thereupon she was offered to them as a replacement.

“It all comes across as so unprofessional,” says Weststrate about the letters she found in her file and which Trouw has seen. It suggests, among other things, that money paid for adoption can also be used for the purchase of a television. Via the Government Information (Public Access) Act, Weststrate asked the government for more information, to no avail. “I had to do it all on my own,” she says.

Wrong place of birth in passport

The day after the meeting in the hotel room, Weststrate travels with Schipper to Narkatiaganj, a town an hour's drive to the north. Schipper was born here. Although her passport states that she was born in Delhi, she found out during one of her previous trips that this was not correct.

Through the court in Delhi, she is trying to get more documents from the children's home in Delhi, where she was placed while the formalities of her adoption were being completed, and where the wrong information ended up in her passport. This takes a long breath; the case has been going on for two years now. In the meantime, she found her baptismal records in a church in Narkatiaganj, with the names of her parents and baptismal parents in the priest's handwriting. Now she wants to review these notes to make sure the papers are authentic.

The church is a light yellow colored building in a middle class residential area. Inside it looks like a house, with a hall and several rooms with colored posters of Jesus on the walls. The priest is not there. Another man cannot find the document Schipper is looking for. It makes Schipper doubt everything. The names of her parents, Peter D'Costa and Monica, are they correct?

'As soon as I could speak Dutch, I said: I want to go back'

Archives with baptismal and marriage certificates are randomly scattered in these types of churches in the region, it appears. The church where Schipper found her baptismal certificate is therefore not the place where the baptism took place. The residential area did not exist at that time. Yet she tells whoever will listen what she is looking for.

The group is soon curiously approached by passers-by. An elderly man invites her for tea and she shows him the poster she made, which she lets local people distribute via WhatsApp. It shows her current picture, her baby picture, birth details and the call for information. “My father may be called Peter D'Costa,” she says. "But I am not sure."

Afterwards, by telephone from the Netherlands, Schipper calls this day the low point of her journey. At that moment it hit hard that she may never know why she was given up and adopted. “I have always had a dissatisfied feeling,” she says. “I am happy with my adoptive parents, but I want to understand what happened.” She already had that feeling as a two-year-old. “As soon as I could speak Dutch, I said: I have to go back.”

'I was going bad, I started thinking about who I am'

For Weststrate, this feeling only came later in life. When she was in her late twenties, she became a victim of the benefits affair and her relationship ended. “It was bad in my life. And with that, I started thinking about who I am and where I come from.”

Towards the end of the trip, Weststrate receives a response to her poster. At least, a couple who initially respond to Schipper's poster subsequently recognizes the dress Weststrate wore in her baby photo. That was their daughter Anita's dress, they say. Anita went missing at Bettiah train station when an uncle was babysitting. Weststrate is full of doubt. “On the one hand I think: this is my family. But on the other hand: there are so many children missing there… and do I really want this to be my family? They are very poor and live in a hovel.”

The orphans who remained behind in India also struggle with questions

It's not just stories about missing children that lie around Bettiah for the taking. There also appear to be many adult orphans who have grown up in children's homes and, unlike Weststrate and Schipper, have never been adopted. “It must have been a strange time that so many children were orphaned in such a small area,” says Schipper. “Because of cholera, floods, poverty... also leaving children in homes by living parents, hoping to offer them a better life, was the most normal thing in the world. This made me realize that my story is not exceptional.”

Schipper's godmother, Agnes, also turns out to be an orphan. Schipper and Weststrate visit her home. Agnes claims that she was asked for baptism by the priest, but that she did not know Schipper's parents. Schipper finds this hard to believe, but Agnes stands her ground.

Schipper therefore does not receive information about her parents from her, but she does provide an important insight: “The orphans there struggle with the same problems as I do. I have often wondered what kind of mother gives her child, poor as she is. In a difficult moment, I proclaimed that I would rather have died with my mother than endure what I have endured. And when we were at Agnes' house, she made exactly the same statement.”

That while she didn't end up badly. “She is a teacher and has the largest house in the village. Apart from her, I also met other orphans who have not been adopted, and now just have a family and a job. So they didn't stand a chance." Adoptes are often told that they have it so much better thanks to their adoption. Schipper no longer believes this after this trip. “I saw myself in the orphans there. They are survivors. I now know it wouldn't have mattered to me. I would also have landed on my feet in Bihar.”

Commission Joustra

The Joustra Committee investigated the adoption of children from Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka in particular between 1967 and 1998, and published the results in February 2021. The Committee concluded that there were structural abuses and problems that still are still not resolved, and therefore advised the government to stop intercountry adoption altogether. It was recently decided that adoption from a select number of countries will be allowed again.

Another advice was to set up a center of expertise, among other things to help adoptees with their search for their biological family. It has now been announced that this center will not provide subsidies for individual searches, but that money is available for interest groups that organize group travel for adoptees.

Schipper and Weststrate are very critical of this. “This completely misses the target,” says Schipper. “You don't want to know how much money I've put into my quest over the years. So I am here to help individuals with money. They should not become dependent on search organizations.”

After their trip as a couple, Schipper and Weststrate also agree that group travel is far from ideal. “You are bothered by others,” says Schipper. Weststrate also advocates subsidies for individual DNA research. She hopes that a test can show whether she has indeed found her family in Bihar.

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