Yahoo! News - Chasing Glimpses of a Past

Yahoo! News - Chasing Glimpses of a Past


Chasing Glimpses of a Past

Sat Aug 28, 7:55 AM ET Add Top Stories - Los Angeles Times to My Yahoo!


By Barbara Demick Times Staff Writer

KUNSAN, South Korea (news - web sites) — The clerk in the police station gives a quizzical look to the young woman in the short green sundress. She has Korean features, but something about her manner and even the sweep of her ponytail is distinctly American.


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He then looks down at the small black-and-white photograph of a baby who was found abandoned in 1975 in front of a nearby bank.


"It's very difficult. There are no records going back that far," the clerk says. "Nobody will remember you from that long ago."


Amanda Lowrey Silva isn't discouraged. The 29-year-old graduate student from Chicago already knows from the cautionary tales of other adoptees and a previous trip here that the search for the missing pieces of her life will be frustrating — and probably fruitless.


Silva has precious few scraps of information. She knows the date she was found, but she doesn't know her birthday. She doesn't know her original name, although the orphanage named her Kim Eun Ja.


Her memories are as precarious as dreams, or perhaps they are dreams after all — she can't be sure. She thinks she remembers a man who wore white-collared shirts and was frequently angry. A mother who comforted her after the fights and held her up cheek to cheek as they gazed at their images in the mirror.


"I miss my birth mother. I've always missed her," she says. "My adoptive mother, too, would hold my face up to hers in the mirror, but it was weird how different she looked from me…. When I was older, I would look in the mirror myself and say, 'God, do I look so Asian?' It was strange."


Since the 1950s, more than 150,000 South Korean children have been sent abroad for adoption, about 100,000 of them to the United States. Long before children began arriving in the U.S. from China and Russia — the two leading countries today for foreign adoptions — there were the Korean babies. Although the number of new arrivals has trailed off since the 1980s, they still make up the largest foreign adoptee population in the United States.


Increasingly, they're returning to their homeland as adults. Especially during summer holidays, the adoptees come by the thousands, often equipped with little more than phrasebooks and printouts from MapQuest showing the locations of towns with unpronounceable names where they might have been born.


Hwang Seung Yeon, a sociologist with Kyung Hee University in Seoul, estimates that about 20% of adoptees have visited South Korea in search of their roots and that eventually as many as 80% will.


There is deep shame about adoption in South Korea, where the subject carries connotations of poverty and extramarital sex. The first generation of adoptees in the years after the 1950-53 Korean War were sent abroad because their families couldn't afford to feed them properly, whereas recent adoptees are more likely to be children born out of wedlock, according to South Korean government statistics.


Last year, the number of babies born in South Korea reached a record low, but the country still sent 2,287 children abroad for adoption. One reason for this statistical oddity is the strong stigma in the country against unmarried mothers.


Adoption agencies here do not release names or addresses of birth parents but will forward letters to them.


"If the mother was unmarried at the time, in about half the cases they'll deny being the birth mother and say you've contacted the wrong person," says Seong Kyong Hee, who works with adult adoptees for Holt International Children's Services Inc., the largest agency handling South Korean adoptions.


At the same time, there has been an outpouring of public sympathy for the adoptees. In the last few years, a number of organizations have begun offering adoptees assistance, including accommodations and even instruction in making kimchi.


The returnees have become darlings of South Korean television. Numerous shows have been aired about their searches and even a few reunions, scripted with the same pathos of the reunions between separated North and South Korean families.


A database set up by the government in 1999 to help track missing children was quickly swamped by adoptees seeking birth parents and birth parents seeking adoptees. ("JiYeoung had beautiful ears," one birth mother wrote of a daughter who had been adopted 28 years earlier. "She was beautiful and voluminous," wrote another. )





This month, the first international conference of Korean adoptees to take place in the country was held in Seoul, attracting about 450 adoptees.

The government agency that oversees the missing-children effort began soliciting DNA samples from adoptees this month for a databank to be used in matching them up with their birth parents.

Eileen Thompson Isaacs, a social worker and adoptee, says that adoptees only recently have realized they have the right and ability to search for their birth parents.

"For us in the older generation, we were told there was no way we would ever see our biological parents again and don't bother," says Isaacs, who was adopted as a 2-year-old in 1959. "Now that we realize that we can, how can we not?"

For Silva, the trip to this small city 100 miles south of Seoul was a long journey, not just geographically, but also psychologically.

When she started the search last year, she had recently married and was working toward a doctorate in viral biology at Northwestern University. She and her husband were trying to decide where to move next, but somehow Silva's past seemed to hold her back from going forward. She became active in an association of South Korean adoptees in Chicago and started to think about her birth parents.

"You come to a point where you think about searching," she says. "You talk about it with your parents. You make the first call to the adoption agency. Each of these little steps takes a while, and there is a whole emotional cycle connected with each one."

Silva first contacted her agency in May 2003 and traveled to South Korea in December. At first, it was overwhelming to be around people with faces like her own, she says.

"On the train, I saw a woman and I thought, 'She really looks like me, she's the right age, could she be [my mother]?' " Silva recalls.

More frustrating was a nagging sense of deja vu that might have been her imagination. Or was it real?

"I had a sensation that I was here before in infancy and I recognized things. But how much of that is genuine and how much is synthetic, I don't know," Silva says. "I don't know which memories are real. That is one thing about being an adoptee — your past can be anything you imagine. It's like you are writing your own personal history."

That first trip left Silva feeling more confused than ever. So she recently came back, on an oppressive August day, accompanied by fellow adoptee Cori McMillan, who was also looking for information about her parents.

Her first stop was the Ilmaekwon Children's Home, a threadbare but scrupulously clean establishment surrounded by lush gardens. There was a maddening din of cicadas and a pungent aroma of dirty diapers.

Silva knelt on the linoleum floor of the nursery to play with some of the toddlers. She cooed annyeong, or "hello," one of the few Korean words she knows.

Silva lived for about a year at this orphanage, where she was brought July 9, 1975, a summer day perhaps much like this one. She was about 6 months old.

A black-and-white photo still pasted in the orphanage's scrapbook shows a baby with skinny legs wearing the flowered dress she is believed to have been wearing the day she was found. Another from the garden of the orphanage shows her dressed like a boy in a white shirt and trousers.

Then come more photos — these in color — showing her at about 18 months in a typically suburban American living room with a man and two slightly older blond boys. Those would be her new brothers and father, a nuclear physicist. The photos were taken in 1976 shortly after Silva's arrival in the United States and mailed by her parents to the adoption agency.

As Silva pores over the album, orphanage director Kim Kuk Jin serves glasses of ice water. He is friendly, eager to be of service, but he doesn't know much. His parents established this orphanage in the 1960s, but he has worked here just three years. Nobody here now has any memory of this particular baby.

Kim looks crestfallen when asked whether he thinks Silva has a chance of finding her birth parents.

"There was another young woman here, not long ago. She met her mother. It was a wonderful thing," he says gently. "But Amanda's case is different. She was abandoned. There are no records."

Kim pulls out a single sheet of paper that sums up Silva's life history until the time she came to the orphanage. Among the scant details: "Found on road in front of Seoul Bank in Kunsan City." "Abandoned." "Condition: weak."

He makes a photocopy and gives it to Silva.

Silva realizes that she has come to a dead end at the orphanage.

"You learn to be suspicious," she says. "Practically all the Korean adoptees find misinformation in their files. They're often told that they were abandoned when they were not or that the records were destroyed because your orphanage burned down. That's a common line."

She moves on to the Kunsan police station. At first, it doesn't seem very promising. The place is painted the pea green that was popular in American elementary schools in the 1970s. The files aren't computerized. The older male clerk, Kim Yeon Sul, who happens to be a retired detective, tries to cheer up Silva by telling her, "You must have been a very beautiful baby with no deformities or distinguishing marks that anyone would remember."

But then one of the clerks, reading through the photocopied sheet from the orphanage, recognizes the name of the woman who is listed as having found the baby: Moon Jeong Hee. A woman who used to work for the Police Department had the same name.

There is a flurry of activity as the retired detective tries to find out where she's living. He rifles through the telephone book. Unlisted.

They start calling around trying to find someone who they think is the brother of the woman's husband. No luck.

By now jet lag and exhaustion are clearly setting in for Silva. Just in time, her cellphone brings a respite. It is a reporter for a local newspaper, the Jeonbuk Ilbo, which Silva had contacted about the cost of running an advertisement for anyone with information about her case.

The reporter says the newspaper will run a story along with any baby pictures for free, another of the many random acts of kindness encountered by adoptees here.

She rushes over to the office in a taxi.

"I think about my mother all the time. I hope she thinks about me," Silva is telling the reporter when the phone rings again. This time, it is the retired detective from the police station. He's found the cellphone number for Moon Jeong Hee. The interview stops as an interpreter dials the telephone number.

No sooner has she started to explain who Silva is than the call is cut off. Everybody exchanges curious glances. Has she hung up?

But then the phone rings again as Moon calls back, apologizing that the battery on her phone ran out.

Yes, indeed, she is most likely the right person. In the 1970s, she worked in the police division responsible for lost and abandoned children. If there was nowhere else, she would often keep the children overnight in her home until the parent was found, and if that didn't happen, it would be her job to take them to the orphanage.

But no, she doesn't have any memory of this particular baby.

"You must have been very special to have been chosen to be adopted to the United States," Moon tells Silva through the interpreter.

As the day drags on, Silva's expectations are clearly lowering. There are no more leads. The trail is cold. She has a flight out in less than 48 hours. She knows that when she gets home to Chicago, her friends and family will ask her whether she found her South Korean family, and she will have to explain.

Silva visits the bank where she was found — more out of a sense of pilgrimage than hope. It is 5 p.m., and the entrance is covered by metal gates. She and McMillan, her friend, look around to see whether there is anybody who might remember a baby abandoned 29 years ago. Hardly. Everything looks like it was built in the last decade. There's a Baskin-Robbins, a Nike store. The name and ownership of the bank changed long ago.

"So this is the famous bank, huh?" McMillan asks.

"Yup," Silva says before posing for a couple of souvenir snapshots. "And it's probably as close as I'm going to get."

This time. She knows she'll be back.

"All I'm really looking for is closure. What is the story? I want to close that chapter of my life and move on," she says. "If I just knew my mother's name. My whole life history hinges on one name."

Abandoned Children Suffered Abuse

Yahoo%21 News - Report%3A Abandoned Children Suffered Abuse

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Report: Abandoned Children Suffered Abuse

Sun Aug 22, 3:43 PM ET


DALLAS - Three of the seven American children abandoned at a Nigerian orphanage had suffered years of abuse, including broken bones and beatings with extension cords, before they were adopted by the woman who left them in Africa, a newspaper reported Sunday.



The oldest of those three children told investigators that her mother and grandmother often beat her and her two brothers with a black belt and an extension cord nicknamed the "persuader," according to court files seen by The Dallas Morning News.


The children's mother denied harming them.


"I gave them nothing more than a little whip on the behind to keep them straight," LaQuinta Teague told the newspaper. "I am a good mother."


Child Protective Services has declined to reveal details of the children's treatment or how it handled allegations of abuse before it approved their adoption in 1996 by Mercury Liggins, who is accused of abandoning them in Africa.


A judge in Fort Bend County sealed the court file containing information about the 1996 adoption of four other Houston-area children by Liggins. However, a juvenile court in Dallas allowed the Morning News to review files for the other three children.


The oldest Dallas girl told CPS caseworkers that her mother and grandmother often beat them.


"She whops (sic) us on our bottom, hips and on our hands," the girl, then 6, told CPS caseworker Kallie Capps.


The children, now ages 8 to 12, were so terrorized that one of the boys told school officials he could not go home after soiling his underwear because he feared he'd be beaten, according to the files.


"The next day, he came to the school with an abrasion on his lip, stating his mother hit him on the mouth with a belt," Capps wrote.


CPS caseworkers investigated abuse allegations at least six times. The children were removed from Teague's custody while she was serving a prison term for assaulting a police officer.


Liggins, the adoptive mother of all seven children, also has been accused of abusing them. CPS officials received several complaints of abuse and neglect, but a spokeswoman said the children always denied they were being abused.


Since they returned from Africa this month, however, the children have told of beatings with canes and switches by Liggins.


U.S. authorities believe the seven American children arrived in Nigeria last October with Liggins, but that she left within weeks. She later took a job as a food-service worker in military mess halls in Iraq (news - web sites), but quit in July, U.S. officials said.


Her attorney said she left the children with her brother-in-law.


The Morning News said Liggins received state child-subsidy payments conservatively estimated at nearly $250,000 between 1996 and 2004, yet her children often complained to neighbors of being hungry. A relative said Liggins treated her biological children well but was miserly toward the adopted children.


Liggins has declined to comment. Her lawyer said she will seek to regain custody of the children, who have been placed in two foster homes pending a custody hearing on Thursday.

Adopted by a priest

Colombian%27s %27adoption%27 by priest too good to be true

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/187185_ariza20.html

Colombian's 'adoption' by priest too good to be true
An unwanted name, a life not of his choosing

Friday, August 20, 2004

By CLAUDIA ROWE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

For years, Ariel Ariza believed that his name was Ariel Mitchell. It was listed on his birth certificate, passport and the papers he filed to enroll at Highline Community College. But it was not a name Ariza ever embraced.

Every time he wrote "Mitchell," it reminded him of the day that the Rev. James Mitchell arrived in his rural mountain village in Colombia -- half a day's walk from the nearest road -- with offers of a way out of poverty, an escape from violence. And, he says, it reminded him of what happened afterward: five years of sexual abuse under the guise of a caring, adoptive father.

Ariza has detailed his charges in a lawsuit, filed in May against Mitchell and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle.

In 1982, Ariza badly needed help. He was 17 years old, and terrified. The priest's arrival in town coincided with his own homecoming from the hospital, where he'd been treated for a bullet wound to the chest. The guerrilla fighters who shot him had already killed his father and sister.

Although he had known the priest for less than a day, Mitchell's suggestion that Ariza leave home and enroll -- for free -- at the priest's school, El Camino, sounded like a godsend.

Almost immediately, Ariza said, Mitchell treated his newest student differently from the rest. At the school near Barbosa, a day's journey from home, he got special food and made private trips into town with the priest. Mitchell told him to consider himself a son, and within weeks, Ariza said, he was sleeping in the man's bed.

"There are so many things that come to your mind -- you don't know what is right and what is wrong," he said in an interview. "He was like my father."

About a year later, the priest offered to make it official.

"He said, 'I can adopt you and bring you to the United States,' " Ariza recalled. " 'You will be my son.' "

They traveled to the U.S. Consulate in Bogota -- to obtain adoption papers, Ariza thought, although what they got turned out to be merely a tourist visa. It was enough to get both men across the border and into California, where, Ariza said, the priest obtained a new birth certificate for him -- with a birth date showing the boy as 16, although he was actually two years older.

"He told me, 'This is the name you're going to be using -- Mitchell,' " Ariza recalled. "He told me the papers are going through, and you are my adopted son. He even gave me his name as my middle name, Ariel James Mitchell. But I was using a name that wasn't mine and claiming that I was born in the United States when I wasn't, so I had a bad feeling."

In 1984, they arrived at Mitchell's new assignment, St. John's Parish in Vancouver, Wash., where the priest had been specially hired to reach out to Spanish speakers. Another teenager from El Camino, whom Mitchell had also offered to adopt, was living there, too, Ariza said.

Together, the three set up house, the boys working in the priest's garden during the day and spending alternate nights in his bed, Ariza said.

"I was scared. First, he said he was going to be my father and take the role of my father, who had just been killed, then he was saying, 'I know you're scared but this is normal. This is what two men should do,'" Ariza said. "He'd threaten to send me back to Colombia if I disobeyed. That was the main threat."

The other boy, reached recently in Oregon, said the priest never harmed him.

Others at St. John's wondered about the new priest's unusual living arrangement. It didn't look right to the Rev. Michael O'Brien, the pastor, but when he learned about Ariza's past -- a father killed by guerillas, a boy rescued from poverty -- he put his misgivings about Mitchell aside.

"Because of the story that he'd actually adopted the boys and they'd come from situations where they were in danger for their lives, it seemed like a noble thing," O'Brien said.

O'Brien said he had a harder time ignoring signs of a drinking problem in Mitchell. He asked Ariza about it one afternoon as they strolled in a nearby park. What, exactly, went on in Mitchell's home, the elder priest asked. How were the boys getting on?

Ariza unloaded, telling all about the promised adoption that had never materialized and the nights of sexual abuse at El Camino. Ariza said he reported that the molestations continued at St. John's, although O'Brien recalls only allegations about Colombia.

O'Brien notified church authorities and, within weeks, Mitchell was summoned to Seattle, sent away for alcoholism treatment and, by 1987, had been removed from the archdiocese. Ariza never saw him again.

Ariza's attorney, Mary Fleck, believes that the church did too little, too late.

"The emphasis was to take care of the priest, not the child," she said. "There should have been supervision of this priest much earlier to find out what was he doing with the boys when he brought them here from another country. If they had looked into his behavior in Colombia, they would have known there were problems, and if they had paid attention to what was going on in Vancouver, they would have reacted a lot sooner."

Greg Magnoni, a spokesman for the Seattle Archdiocese, explained that Mitchell, who was ordained in Colombia, was operating here essentially as a freelancer and, as such, would have been subject to less rigorous oversight.

"He really was not one of ours, so there wouldn't be the same personnel record as there would be for one of our diocesan priests," Magnoni said. "We've made mistakes and apologized for those mistakes, but that's unfortunately not a sufficient response from the perspective of the victims. We recognize that."

Mitchell was gone from Ariza's life, but his problems were far from over. No one from the church helped him find a new place to live, he said, although a local family took him in. He supported himself with a series of odd jobs and eventually enrolled at Highline Community College in Des Moines.

Only years later, when attempting to transfer to the University of Washington, was Ariza contacted by federal immigration agents and informed that the papers he'd presented affirming his identity -- the ones that Mitchell had provided from California -- were falsified. His marriage to an American secured his status here in the early 1990s, but he continues to wrestle with questions of identity.

Mitchell has not responded to requests for comment.

Under the circumstances of his removal from ministry here, Magnoni said, the priest's prospects for serving in another diocese would be severely limited.

Nevertheless, a 2002 report in The Spokesman-Review in Spokane showed Mitchell in ceremonial garb, baptizing a Spanish-speaking family in his Pullman home. When informed last week, Spokane church officials reacted with surprise.

"He does not have any permission to function as a priest in the Diocese of Spokane," said Steven Dublinski, the vicar general there. "I know he's down in Pullman, but he does not function as a priest here in any way. We'll look into it."

Mitchell currently lives with two other young men from El Camino. Only one, Adelmo Leon, agreed to speak with a reporter, and he staunchly defended the priest.

In an interview, Leon recalled the day Father Mitchell arrived in his rural Colombian village, seven hours' walk from the nearest road, just as he had with Ariza. Throughout his nine subsequent years with the cleric -- beginning at age 16 -- Leon said, Mitchell had never made an inappropriate move. Ariza's sexual abuse charges are baseless, he insists.

"I'm 100 percent sure of it," he said. "I've been living with Father Mitchell since 1996, and I know him very well. He is doing such good things for so many people."

The priest's presence undoubtedly has been life-changing for Leon. Mitchell helped his student win a scholarship to Washington State University and put Leon up in his spacious home, where wall-to-wall carpeting pads his every footstep. On a recent Friday evening, the young man looked around at his new American life and smiled contentedly.

"I never could have achieved anything like this without Father Mitchell," he said.

THIS SERIES
Yesterday, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that dozens of clerics across the country who were accused of molesting minors lived with children, often serving as legal parents or guardians. Among them were four priests in Washington, who were later removed from the ministry for sexual abuse. Today, two Seattle-area men describe abuse inflicted when they were children living with priests.



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P-I reporter Claudia Rowe can be reached at 206-448-8320 or claudiarowe@seattlepi.com

Mom mourns tiny baby kept in shoebox

News - Post-Tribune %28Northwest Indiana%29

Mom mourns tiny baby kept in shoebox
Aug. 18, 2004


By Jonathan Lipman

Daily Southtown staff writer

An infant boy was found dead in a shoebox in the home of his 15-year-old mother in Lansing, Ill., on Monday.

That girl wants you to know she didn’t kill the baby. She wants you to know what really happened to her infant son.

How she hid her pregnancy from her family for seven months.

How she gave birth on her own, in a bathtub, at 4 in the morning last Friday.

How she slept next to the tiny body, born two months premature, for two days, without telling a soul, even though she knew her child was dead.

About his name — Raphael Pierre.

She wants you to know she was trying to do what she thought right. But she made mistakes.

“I would like people to know I loved him,” she said. “And I tried to do the most responsible thing I could do.”

The Cook County Medical Examiner’s office lists the child’s first name as “Baby Boy.” On Tuesday, the medical examiner ruled the infant died naturally because it was born premature. Police are investigating, but already have said they don’t believe a crime occurred.

The teenager, whose name is being withheld, nevertheless feels at fault. With hair pulled back by a headband and a black Snoopy shirt on her small frame, she looked at the ground and described what happened to “my baby.”

“He was born premature because I didn’t get any natal care,” she said. “And because I was so young.”

The teen said she got pregnant Feb. 4, by a boy she knew from school whom she had been dating for three months. She learned about the pregnancy in May and knew it was a mistake.

“I regret making that mistake, but I understood my pregnancy,” she said, her voice full of conviction. “I wasn’t going to have an abortion ... if I couldn’t give him away, I would have just left (with the baby).”

The girl lives with her parents and brothers in a two-story home on a quiet street in Lansing. Proud of her family, she was afraid of letting her parents down.

“I would rather be a missing girl than have me living off my family like that. Why should they provide for me and my mistake?” she said.

So she made a plan: She would conceal the pregnancy and would arrange for the baby’s adoption on her own. She started calling adoption agencies and settled on The Cradle, based in Evanston, in June. The agency agreed to work with her without telling her parents.

“I wore big shirts,” she said proudly. “And it was a small pregnancy. The day I tried on my graduation dress, that was the day I almost got caught.”

But her parents never figured it out. Last Thursday night, she was supposed to meet a counselor from the adoption agency at a nearby restaurant.

But she began to feel cramps and couldn’t go.

“I didn’t know I was in labor, I just figured I was cramping up,” the girl said.

Determined to keep the pregnancy secret, the girl crawled into the bathtub.

She had no medication, no medical help, and no idea what to do.

At about 4 a.m., she gave birth, all alone.

“It wasn’t bad. I figured it would be worse. I just kept that in mind.”

Right away, she knew the baby was in trouble. He came two months early, and the girl could hear no heartbeat from her new son.

“He didn’t cry. He just shook a little,” she said.

Within 15 minutes, newly named Raphael Pierre was dead.

“I just sat there, I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I didn’t call police. I didn’t have a phone, and I still didn’t want to tell my parents. ... After watching him die in my arms, I just couldn’t do that to them.”

Instead, she took the body of the infant back to her room and curled up with him in her bed.

She kept him there for three days.

“Even though he was dead, I still wanted to be with him,” she said, crying. “Because he was so pretty.”

She spent as much time as she could with the little boy’s body, but still tried to hide what happened from her parents. On Friday, the day she gave birth, she spent the afternoon doing yard work. On Monday, she decided it was time to tell the boy’s father. She placed the baby’s body in a shoebox and went to meet him at school.

After he saw the child, the couple decided to call the adoption counselor.

The agency told them to call police, who came to the home, found the baby, and told the girl’s parents what happened.

She still hasn’t talked to her parents directly about the pregnancy. She says she can’t.

The girl’s parents declined to be interviewed.

The mother said this has happened too fast for her to explain clearly what she feels.

“My daddy, he was worried about my health, and my mommy, she was just confused,” the girl said. “She was so confused how I could go through labor and then smile the next day.”

The girl was hospitalized briefly with an infection, but was told she’ll recover. What she doesn’t know is how she’ll face her family again. She’s still afraid of what they may think.

And she doesn’t know how to make it up to Raphael Pierre. She said she know she owes him.

“I would rather be,” she said, speaking slowly and fighting back tears, “in his situation.”

Texas adoptive abandoned in Africa

CNN.com - Seven%A0Texas%A0children%A0found%A0in%A0Nigeria orphanage - Aug 17%2C 2004


Seven Texas children found in Nigeria orphanage
Youths, thin and covered with bites, returned to state



HOUSTON, Texas (AP) -- Seven Texas children were discovered abandoned at a Nigerian orphanage, ravaged by disease and malnutrition, and have been brought back to the state.

Child Protective Services, which received emergency custody of the children Monday, is investigating accusations that the children's adoptive mother in Houston abandoned them in Nigeria in October while going to work in Iraq as a private contractor. The children returned to Texas on Friday.

Three of the children were hospitalized with malaria and later released, said CPS spokeswoman Estella Olguin. The youths were thin and covered with mosquito bites, infections and scars.

The three boys and four girls, ranging from 8 to 16, were discovered in late July by a visiting Texas missionary who notified American lawmakers.

"It's horrible, horrible," Olguin said. "I haven't seen anything like it. Seven children fending for themselves in a foreign country where they have no family members."

Now, they are living in two Houston foster homes.

Four siblings were adopted from Houston in 1996, followed by a set of three siblings from Dallas in 2001, according to authorities who interviewed the children and their adoptive mother.

The woman, whose name was not released, took all the children in October to Nigeria, where a relative of her fiance lived. The children were enrolled in school and the mother returned to Houston about 30 days later. She went to work in Iraq in April.

But the children were later removed from school because payment for their tuition stopped and lived in a wooden shack. Nigerian child-protection authorities found the children malnourished and sick and moved them to an orphanage in late July.

A minister from a San Antonio church who overheard the children speaking with American accents interviewed them, then alerted U.S. congressmen who called CPS.

State officials will determine whether criminal charges will be filed against the adoptive mother, who is due back in court August 26.









Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com//2004/US/Southwest/08/17/abandoned.children.ap/index.html

Pregnant by Jesus?

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Pregnant by Jesus?


Pregnant by Jesus?
They're called "miracle babies" and for some childless couples in Britain, they're a dream come true. But doctors and Church of England officials are worried the babies aren't miracles at all, but either a shortcut adoption process or a baby-trafficking scheme.


Down a telephone line from Africa, Charles Nyeko hears the worry in his wife's voice. When she speaks to him from Kenya, where she went to have their "miracle baby", Miriam Nyeko sounds just awful.

"Miriam is in a terrible state, with no idea what will happen," the product designer, who lives in London, says. "We don't know what to think."

The Nyekos are the latest couple who claim to have had a miracle conception. Members of one of Britain's fastest-growing churches - the Gilbert Deya Ministries - they say their three-week old son is a "miracle from God."

But the Church of England and Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology are calling for an investigation into the so-called "miracle babies" being born to British women.

A BBC investigation looked into the births and discovered that the church's leader, Kenyan-born Gilbert Deya, prays over the childless women, and they are pronounced pregnant by Jesus.

Backstreets of Nairobi

The women then travel to Kenya where they apparently give birth in what are described as backstreet clinics in Nairobi.

Radio 4's Face the Facts discovered that one of the "miracle babies" has been taken into care after tests revealed that its DNA did not match either of its parents. Later, it was discovered the child's Kenyan birth certificate was a forgery.


"I believe in miracles, but I don't believe that people can have babies miraculously that have totally different DNA," says Dominic Walker, the Bishop of Monmouth. "I think it's very difficult when people are claiming something's a miracle when perhaps it's a criminal activity."

But Archbishop Deya - whose group has more than 36,000 members in Britain and which is building a £1 million church in south London - told the BBC that there was no explanation for the miracle babies. He said he wasn't surprised their DNA wasn't the same as their parents, as they came from God.

The Archbishop said he's seen post-menopausal women give birth, including a 56-year-old who has had 13 miracle babies over the past three years.

"The 'miracle babies' which are happening now in our ministry is beyond a human imagination, but it's not something that ... I can explain because they are of God and things of God cannot be explained by human beings," Archbishop Deya said.

"Unless somebody's blind, how can you say the woman is not pregnant?" he added. "We witness they are pregnant, they went to Kenya and they came with the babies, so we believe that where the tummy was big the baby has come out."

The ministry has 14 branches in Britain, as well as locations in Africa, Asia, and other parts of Europe, and Archbishop Deya has attracted the attention of authorities in the past.

Investigation

He was investigated by the Church of England after conducting exorcisms on young children, but no action was taken.

The Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology echoes the Church of England's concerns, saying it's possible vulnerable people are being taken advantage of.

"Childless couples were very vulnerable and desperate that they would believe virtually anything," says consultant Patrick O'Brien, noting that medical evidence proved the women were not pregnant before the births.


"These are not miracle children, but someone else's children, and the authorities should find out whose."

But Charles Nyeko says the birth of his son, Daniel, is simply a gift from God.

"Now we have the proof - a miracle from God," he tells the programme. "We don't understand how it has happened. We are just grateful that it has. We have the son we so longed for and I am convinced that it is a miracle, a miracle I never thought I'd see in my lifetime."

But the couple is unsure that they'll be able to bring Daniel to Britain, as the Kenyan authorities are insisting on DNA testing to determine if he is the biological child of the Nyekos.

Along with the Metropolitan Police, the United Nations Children's Fund told Face the Facts that it will be launching an investigation into child exploitation and baby trafficking in Kenya in an attempt to get to the bottom of how babies born in Africa are being passed to foreign mothers.

"We want to know exactly what's happening," says Anna Miracow, a UN child protection officer. "What are the reasons, if it's happening, how are they being taken out, where are the loopholes?"

DNA bank project in Cincinnati could reunite adoptees, birth parents

AP Wire | 08/13/2004 | DNA bank project in Cincinnati could reunite adoptees, birth parents

Posted on Fri, Aug. 13, 2004





DNA bank project in Cincinnati could reunite adoptees, birth parents

MITCH STACY

Associated Press


SARASOTA, Fla. - Linda Hammer remembers a caller to her radio show who told of spending $100,000 for medical tests trying to find the cause of a young daughter's mysterious illness.

The child eventually died, without doctors ever figuring out exactly what happened. It wasn't until two years later - when the girl's mother found her own birth mother after years of searching - that she learned of a rare genetic disorder in her biological family, a problem that likely killed her child.

If she had found her birth mother earlier, the woman lamented, her daughter might have been saved.

Hammer, a Sarasota resident who has helped thousands of adoptees find birth families through her people-finding Web site, weekly radio show and newspaper column, loves the warm, fuzzy side of those reunions. But she's also seen how profoundly they can impact lives.

Now the former private investigator is hoping to incorporate science into the effort with an ambitious new project: a DNA bank in Cincinnati where samples from adoptees and birth parents who are searching for one another can be added to a central database to be compared with other samples for possible matches.

The theory is that the genetic fingerprint could be the only way to reunite adoptees with birth parents in the many cases where names were changed, birth certificates were altered or babies were bought on the black market. Sometimes no paper trail existed, and adoption records remain closed in all but a handful of states.

"This isn't really about search and reunions, it's about knowing who you are," said the 50-year-old Hammer, co-founder of the nonprofit Touched by Adoption advocacy group, based in Walton, Ky. "A lot of this stuff is life or death."

Hammer, who is not an adoptee herself, wants the service to be free to everyone, which means her organization is starting to raise money for the project, to be based at DNA Diagnostic Center Inc. in Cincinnati. An initial fund-raising dinner is set for next month and others are planned. It's expected to cost more than $1 million to set up the project and bank the first 5,000 samples.

Adoptees and birth parents who want to participate will be sent a kit with cotton swabs to take three samples from the inside of their cheeks, said Jim Hanigan, a spokesman for DNA Diagnostic Center. The swabs are then mailed back to the lab, where 16 DNA markers will be extracted for comparison with other samples in the database.

While many labs offer DNA banking, paternity testing and various other services, Hanigan believes this is the first time the technology has been used to assist people searching for family members. DNA Diagnostic Center is one of the country's largest labs, handling about 75 percent of all DNA paternity testing.

"The opportunities for DNA testing are widening all the time, and it's more than the normal forensics things you see on TV," Hanigan said. "And this is a great one."

The National Council for Adoption, based in Alexandria, Va., estimates that 5 million to 6 million people in the United States have been adopted. Lee Allen, spokesman for the nonprofit advocacy group, said many states already have registries for adoptees and birth parents who are looking for each other, which is basically the low-tech method of doing what Hammer wants to do with DNA.

The organization welcomes any effort that will help bring together adoptees and birth parents who want to find each other, Allen said, but he questioned whether the cost will warrant the relatively few reunions such a project is likely to produce.

"I think it could be helpful," Allen said. "I think the difficulty will be promoting it and getting this kind of registry well known."

Hammer is undeterred by the cost and the legwork involved. She's trying to promote the project among health care professionals and others who realize the importance of people knowing their medical histories, and hopes to spread the word with public service announcements for TV and radio.

She even envisions being able to reunite babies who were airlifted out of Vietnam by the thousands in the 1970s with birth parents still in that country.

"They have a right to know who they are," she said. "I know who I am, and if I didn't I'd be jumping up and down and making ugly faces about it. It's just not fair."

Honduras prosecutor seeks arrest of US adoption rep

Printed from kgw.com

Honduras prosecutor seeks arrest of US adoption rep.
12:48 PM PDT on Friday, August 13, 2004

Associated Press


TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras -- Prosecutors on Friday asked courts to order the arrest of a U.S. adoption organization's local representative, accusing her of participating in illegal adoptions.


The government's special prosecutor for children, Victor Fernandez, said a trial in the case had begun on Thursday in the northern city of San Pedro Sula.


The allegations involve Tatyana Tsybulskaya, who officials say was the local representative for Orphans Overseas, a Portland, Oregon, based organization that says it operates in at least six other countries.


First Lady Aguas Ocana last month accused the organization of offering at least six Honduran children for adoption for US$11,550, despite the fact it lacked an operating permit.


She said she was offended that it offered price estimates, as if the children were for sale.


Fernandez said that Tsybulskaya left the country on July 23. He said she has passports from Kazakhstan, Romania and Russia, "so we have solicited the help of the International Police," or Interpol.


The government in February rejected the organization's request to operate in the country, but as of July, it still listed some Honduran children on its internet site.


On Friday, the site read: "Our Honduras Program is currently in the development stage. Check back for updates."


A recording at the organization's telephone number said the office was closed on Friday.


Last month, a representative for Orphans Overseas said the agency was still seeking permission to carry out adoptions in Honduras.


"We're certainly not offering any child for sale or even adoption over the Internet," said Tad Kincaid, the director of operations.


But the site at the time carried photographs of smiling Honduran children and said, "We have several children available that are in the 2-5 age range."


The organization founded by Jordi Kincaid, herself an adoptee, describes itself as a Christian adoption agency that is "committed to helping orphan children worldwide."


It said it had helped in more than 600 adoptions and listed operations in China, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Russia, Ukraine, and Vietnam.