Kana Verheul, center, with her niece, right, and her long-lost sister Taslima, left. 

Excerpts from a story in The Guardian – LINK>The stranger across from me was my sister: how one adoptee uncovered a tragic past.

After decades of trying in vain to find her siblings, Verheul joined forces with other people in her situation to set up an organization called the Shapla Community, creating a network of hundreds of Bangladesh adoptees raised in the Netherlands. If she could not find her own family, she could at least help others find theirs.

Verheul was among those from Shapla who spent hours interviewing Bangladeshis with extraordinary stories about their children, many of whom claim they were taken for adoption abroad without their consent. It was one of these interviews that led her to the cafe meeting with a woman from the area where she was born. Verheul tried to see if there was any family resemblance with the woman, but could not see any. “Some details matched but some did not,” she says. “Her sister was called Nasima. I truly believed that Kana was my real Bangladeshi name because it was in my birth papers. I couldn’t comprehend that I may be Nasima. Then I asked them the name of the village I have in my Bangladeshi passport, and she said, ‘Yes, that’s where we lived before.’”

Verheul was still not convinced, so she asked if there were any birthmarks. “The woman said her mother would often tell bedtime stories about the sister who was lost, that they both had the same birthmark on their leg. This was a shock because I have one on my knee.” In disbelief, the women headed to the toilets and revealed their almost identical birthmarks. They hugged and cried, and soon afterwards, Verheul says, “I finally saw the resemblances between us – in her hands, her mannerisms. I have really funny feet, and she has the same funny feet,” she laughs. “It felt undeniable, but I couldn’t accept it fully until the result of the DNA test came in.”

Verheul returned to the Netherlands and anxiously awaited the results. Two weeks after they met, a DNA test confirmed they were sisters. “I remember like it was yesterday. I was driving on the highway when the doctor called. I could finally accept that this was my sister. Immediately I got a huge headache. I had to stop next to the road. I started crying. From all over, from my ears, from my toes, from deep inside me. I cried for an hour.”

Amid the joy of finding the woman she had spent decades trying to find, her sister, Taslima, was able to explain to Verheul how she came to be adopted abroad as a baby. The story she shared horrified Verheul, but it also confirmed suspicions that she had had for years. Verheul, a mother of two, clearly adores her “wish parents”, the term she uses to describe couples who adopt. Taslima told Verheul their mother had never intended to give her away. She explained that her father had three wives, and one of them had convinced him to take Nasima to a daycare home nearby when her mother was away because she had become ill and needed medical care. When Verheul’s mother came back and discovered what had happened, it was too late. Nasima had already gone from the children’s home. She had been adopted by a couple in the Netherlands who believed she was an orphan. “My mother divorced my father because of this,” says Verheul. “My father passed away in 2012, my mother in 2014,” she says. “But they were still alive when I was searching for my family in Tongi. At one point, I had even stood on the doorstep of my father’s home. That still hurts.”

In 2017, Shapla was officially founded, to help adoptees find their relatives in Bangladesh. The organization began recruiting fieldworkers in both countries – volunteers who would interview relatives, collect data and identify leads that could eventually result in a reunion. They set up a DNA database and started to collate everyone’s adoption documents. “That’s when we saw certain patterns – the adoption storylines were all the same. The mother had died of poor health, father died in an accident, and grandmother or aunt brought the baby to a home.” Some information was identical, says Verheul, like “a copy-and-paste job”. The group believes that instead of international adoption, the focus should be on supporting vulnerable families, strengthening youth care systems, and improving quality of care in countries of origin so children can be cared for in familiar surroundings. Their argument is in line with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which recognizes the right of children to grow up in their own culture, befitting their own identity.

“As an adoptee you often hear, ‘You’re lucky, now you have a good life.’ But you cannot really compare the two,” says Kana. “In one sense I feel lucky that I have the best of both worlds. But nothing makes up for the loss you had to endure. Because I lost my family and my real identity.” She recently bought a plot of land in the village named in her passport. “I want to build a house there, for my sister to live in if she wishes. I would like to spend time there too.”