Real Families: Sisterhood & Searching for Roots | The Real Lion

[Music] i have this dream where i'm walking as a young girl towards this woman i can't see her face but i instinctively know who she is and just as i get close enough to see her the door slams i have to find this woman because i know she is my mother over 11 000 people who were born in sri lanka have been adopted overseas so these are my adoption papers it's all i've ever had regards to who i am and where i came from many have grown up knowing very little about the parents and culture they left behind there is a massive chapter of my life that's missing because i wasn't born rebecca i was born something else two women are now returning to find their birth parents i need to know the story the first few weeks of my life and why my mother gave me away so i have returned it to search for my mother for my roots and essentially for myself they are searching not just for family but for a lost identity i've had so many rejection issues for so long my whole life i've thought that i wasn't wanted at all excuse me i'm looking for my mother i can't leave without knowing i'm looking for my mother this is me i have to find her i have to find someone [Music] olivia luke come on should we wake up leah okay girl to start getting up all right we're gonna be late come on ah there we go found them this is the photo that was taken of me i'd say probably about three days after i'd been adopted and this photo is the earliest record that i have of my life but prior to that it's blank rebecca was adopted from sri lanka when she was just three months old [Music] she now has four children of her own so olivia is my third chatterbox and this is luke and this is my big boy aren't you my big boy and that's my naughty eldest teenager and this is my little one-year-old shannon say hello see you for those [Music] so both of my adoptive parents moved to england in the 60s from sri lanka and they couldn't have children so they came back to sri lanka in 79 to adopt me i grew up a very precious only child and you know i had the lavish parties nice holidays always had the best clothes best education i had everything but this was a community where adoption was a taboo um it's never it was never discussed so as a consequence for the first eight years of my life i thought this was it this was my family these were my relatives [Music] so eight years old back from school and it was the ritual of having a bath on a friday night so i went up to get the towels i came into my mother's room with something very similar to this and there were a lot of clothes but i noticed at the top that there were towels and let's put my hand in to grab there were papers and grabbed onto all these papers that had come out and i could see the word adoption on it and i then could just see my name everywhere i blamed my mother a lot for it i kid you not i blamed her a lot rebecca's adoptive parents are still alive but she rarely talks to them and never about her adoption she did come to know about it but then i told her daughter i am very sorry you are an abundant child if i know your parents i would have taken you and showed them this is the child god gave me i loved her and i brought her up as my own we worked very hard to bring her everything i want to give her the best education that was the best thing i want to do for her everything that is best as soon as i found this adoption order i realized that my entire childhood had been fake and i actually have completely different family out there that i actually came from and ever since becoming an adult i have just been trying to find out who they are rebecca's husband anton is also sri lankan and has been with her since she began searching when i first met rebecca she said i come with a lot of at that point i didn't realize how much this would dominate our lives and how much it defines her as a person the two of them are now preparing for their third trip back to sri lanka to find rebecca's birth family so 10 years ago we went back first time search and at that point in time we went with all of these documents to the columbia cults and we came back out with nothing five years later we went back to the two hospitals one named in my birth certificate one on my adoption order but again nothing now the only place left for us to go to is the registered general's office that's the vault of sri lanka that holds all information in terms of births debts and adoption registries and orders and that will be the last thread of hope but this trip will be the last one rebecca and anton can do together five years ago um anton was diagnosed with motor neurone disease when i found out actually my world shattered last year in fact i started to notice that anton's speech was becoming quite difficult for him and he was finding it difficult to walk so this truly is my last search and i need to accept what comes adoptions from sri lanka escalated with the outbreak of the civil war in 1983. this bloody conflict raged for 25 years and created tens of thousands of orphans [Music] european adoption agencies were quick to respond they set up networks that allowed destitute families to hand over children they could no longer look after more than 11 000 babies were given up and adopted into europe where they would begin very different lives so this is the first ever piece of equipment i bought and although it doesn't look like much it's the real deal for me and i absolutely love it my name is ria and i'm 26 years old and i've lived here since i was about three weeks old ria grew up in the scottish highlands and runs her own gardening business so my parents couldn't have any kids of their own um so they went through a dutch adoption agency to get me and brought me here which is about 20 miles from inverness and is pretty much in the middle of nowhere it was fine for me growing up and i enjoyed it but i stuck out basically like a sore thumb i was definitely one of the only brown people in my hometown but i was completely happy as a kid i never thought about searching or even investigating my adoption it's only recently that i've started to feel like i'm a bit stuck in between these two countries and what seems like two very different identities i think it's kind of feeling like you don't properly belong anywhere in some way and it doesn't necessarily really upset me but it's it's there and i always wonder what my life would have been like in sri lanka [Music] riya lives with her girlfriend kat they've been to sri lanka on holiday but this is their first trip to search for ria's family so these are the documents that the dutch adoption agency gave to my adoptive parents it's all i've ever had and with regards to who i am and where i came from i'm sure that it was quite a traumatic thing it's three weeks old to be taken away from my my mum and putting an arm to somebody else that smelled different and put in a plane and taken to the side of the world apparently i cried for six months after i arrived here this for me was the most interesting piece because it gives me a bit of information about my birth mother she was unmarried she was illiterate unemployed the mother has given this baby for adoption as she and her family are not capable of supporting it and i think this is quite significant i think um says it's a note as the mother does not favor any further contact with her it will not be possible to meet her again in any connection whatsoever in the future and that caused quite a lot of emotion in me i remember being quite upset by that i think there was a feeling of rejection that came up and it has created quite a lot of questions [Music] that's a picture of my birth mother it's just a very bizarre feeling looking at that and knowing that that's me and that woman gave birth to me and wanting to know if she's alive if she thinks about me if she does want to see me and i feel like it would ground me so much if i knew like it feels vital for me to get as much information as i possibly can so i have to go back and search [Music] there are 21 million people living in sri lanka it's an island of isolated villages and dense cities [Music] finding anyone is a difficult task soria has employed an investigator called siri silva to help her hello he specializes in adoption searches so i brought everything document wise from birth certificates medical reports i took everything and i brought the clothes that i arrived in little waistcoat and shorts that's what i was wearing when i was handed over apparently [Music] [Music] rebecca and anton are in the capital colombo for their third search we've been here many times before but this time there is a certain air of anticipation and hope i am spending pretty much every sort of waking sleeping moment thinking my life might be so different in a couple of weeks there we go and it needs to be a height that i can write at across there okay rebecca's starting point is the story she was told about how she was adopted the story my adoptive mother told me was that i'd been found on a bench outside lady ridgeway children's hospital in colombo my adoptive parents were told by relatives in sri lanka that there was a child available and they flew out to adopt me i was then subsequently taken from the hospital to the adoption court but during the legal process a new birth certificate was issued with only my adoptive parents name on it removing all trace of the woman who gave birth to me [Music] over the last 10 years rebecca and anton have visited every place connected with her adoption except the registrar general's office so on this search they are casting the net even wider how are you winter nimo is an old friend who's helping rebecca he's printed out 2 000 leaflets telling her story [Applause] this is a leaflet which we are planning to distribute to shanties and towns where we think it could lead to more people coming out this search is the last throw of the dice for me if we don't achieve anything that the registered generals offers then we have to search island wide rebecca's only got two weeks in sri lanka so nimal has already organised a press conference for that afternoon so 38 years and six months later i have returned yet again to search for my mother for my roots and essentially for myself not a moment has gone by since the age of eight that i have not thought of my birth mother nor of my extended birth family that live here in sri lanka so a press conference is the only way for me to reach all the people island wide because i don't know which part of the island i come from which town i come from so for all mothers who are hearing me there is a number that you all can reach out to find me [Music] when you're searching you are largely dependent on luck and the chance that someone reads a newspaper or recognizes a face and the only hope you have is to believe that something will happen to bring the two of us together i never switch off when i'm here never i can't do that i'm looking at people on the road looking at people in the cars just looking to see whether you know anyone looks familiar to me um do they look like me i think i'm just watching people in their way of life thinking that could be me as well that could have been my way of life it's constant it's absolutely constant so this place that we're staying at is the perfect spot because we're just surrounded by nature and loads of plants that are really familiar to me i'm feeling quite excited and i'm also feeling really nervous and a little bit sick a lot of the time because i don't really know what to expect to begin ria's search siri has asked to see her papers from the adoption agency can we sit here yeah so okay please ria has never shown these to anyone before let me see let me see your birth certificate first okay yes this is even your mother's name is mentioned that's very good that's the dress isn't it yeah this is a small village i think okay i think this is a small village does it look real because there are a lot of uh fake things i found because these kind of papers some are right some are wrong does that happen quite a lot it's quite quite happening yeah sometimes children's are born in an illegal secret way yeah having an affair having an affair so what they do the mothers deliver the baby left the baby in hospital and mothers go home so then adoption organization they get the baby and they give the fake papers for the court it's awful and i'm assuming that all these adoptive parents have no idea about no not so that photograph might potentially not be my birth mother i hope she is a right mother but yeah you don't know my god the first thing i want to be sure whether you really born in this hospital yeah if you're born in that hospital you will see inner record books your name there yeah yeah and of course your mother name maybe you will find maybe not so before you start these things you have to be prepared in series experience almost half of all adoption papers contain false names or addresses minister admits illegal adoption trade thank god all kinds of documents were falsified by adoption authorities including birth certificates and the identity [Music] in some institutions there were acting mothers who were paid to pretend to be the biological parents while handing them over to i think it's difficult enough being adopted but having all this i think this news has totally floored ria she's got a lot of paperwork and it looks really legit and it's difficult to imagine that that might have all been faked when she gets overwhelmed she has a tendency to just completely close herself off from everybody including me so i'm quite worried about what she's gonna find out and how that's gonna affect her by the time ria was born in 1991 adoption was a booming business with thousands of european couples desperate for a child lawyers and agencies were making millions from the fees they charged to keep up the supply of babies vulnerable mothers were targeted at hospitals and persuaded to give up their children documents were faked and other women stood in at the adoption courts european parents were often told that the birth mother simply wanted no further contact with the child ria's birth certificate says she was born at kalutara hospital if it is genuine it should match with the hospital's birth register [Music] very very long time it's a long time ago she means and some documents are damaged you know but the complete book is gone the whole book is gone yeah yeah is there one for july is there one for july 1990 1991 that's 1989 1989 1991 so you have burst from 1991 in the book it says that's not the right year the information is just really inaccurate isn't it it seems to be just dates all over the place and my breath could be somewhere by the looks of it but it might be in 1981 for all looking at that it could be anywhere yeah so there's a chance that my birth records could be fake is that what she's does [Music] thank you very much [Music] when you're adopted there's so much trust put in to the documentation that you have because it's it's ultimately absolutely everything that gives you any identity and tells the story of who you are if they're taken away i've realized i have absolutely nothing to to identify with and it basically it brings up the question me of who who am i and maybe i've been really stupid maybe i should have questioned my documentation but i've had nothing to give me any idea that things might not be the way that they seemed i'm sensing that you know there's a lot more to the whole adoption process than i originally thought so that's photographs there's not one bit of me that thinks that's definitely my mom i don't trust it at all and that's a really strange feeling because i have trusted it to a certain degree until now and now that dress is all gone [Music] no nothing in that okay let's look at the dynamina it's been two days since the press conference and a little disappointed that we haven't really seen anything in the process yet um and the scale of the search is unbelievable today is a vital day in rebecca's search the registrar general has finally agreed to look for her adoption file number fc39 i know today is key because all my details should be in this file including my original birth certificate probably even an original consent form from the mother it should basically have every single paper pertaining to that court case on the 25th of july that then gets taken and archived in this particular location i'm here to see the registrar general through there thank you after 10 years of searching this is her last chance of finding any paperwork relating to her birth or her biological mother okay so thank you for seeing us and um i'm here because i'm trying to retrieve my adoption um details all we want from that file is is there anything linking to rebecca's biological parent yes don't you know her name oh anything nothing we know nothing i tell you if we have a name i won't be sitting here okay if we have that the previous uh birth certificate numbers we can go that path no [Music] july 25th 39 fc no there has not the previous but it's not registered could it be that it was registered but no one submitted that certificate or she didn't the mother didn't have the birth certificate to submit maybe she lost it sometimes he may be the unmarried mother so she don't want to register the birth and she maybe face a lot of we don't know we can't wipe a person out of this planet and make them non-existent there has to be something that leads to her dead or alive can you imagine every 18th of april her birthday she's thinking about her mother [Music] sorry [Music] seeing an actual book with my court case number on it but then to see a dash for every part of me that would have been my identity it's like someone has completely erased my existence from this planet i'm an invisible entity i don't exist i don't exist a lot of people say to me that i should stop searching that i should be grateful for everything that life in britain has given me but they've never had the childhood i've had this is my adoptive mother we didn't have a relationship our relationship revolved around school homework and grades i lived my life in fear it was fear of not accomplishing it was a fear of not doing the right thing it was a fear of you know um i don't know it was a fear of everything maybe if i was happy as a child i won't be searching as hard as i'm searching my identity was all created for me by my adoptive mother and she made me into who she wanted me to be finding my birth family means i go back to that primal root of who i actually am i will not be able to form myself from what it actually truly is not what people want it to be the next day rebecca's story finally makes the newspapers with no official routes left she must find her mother through word of mouth excuse me can i give you this leaflet yeah thank you my wife is looking for a mother she's there the plan is to try and get to the bus station or the train station so that we can basically get these leaflets out to all the people that are traveling towards various areas because i think a lot of these mothers tend to come from outside of colombo as well deliver here and then go back so i'm trying to target the crowd i can't really get to there's a number here if you know anything thank you i'm not discounting anybody i'm trying to reach out as many people in this island as possible because you don't know how you're going to miss someone you're searching for that face in that crowd thank you thank you yeah [Music] yeah i'm looking for my mother this is me so i'm just searching to see if [Music] [Music] by sunset she's handed out 500 leaflets but anton's legs have given up i've never been here on the streets doing this and i actually feel sorry for myself if you don't know what i'm saying because i'm here now kind of like prostituting my baby self to random people at the train station but right now i haven't got time i haven't got time to think about that i have to do my what i'm here for [Music] i can't leave without knowing who my mother is i have to find her four days after visiting the hospital siri still can't confirm if ria's documents are genuine uh what we're going to do today first i try to check the address okay yeah that's the dress that's on the birth certificate yeah yeah his only option is to search for the village on ria's papers but he doesn't know if it even exists do you feel optimistic that we might find something with all everything that we have we have no clear address we have no clear things but i try my best you know this feels like the sort of last attempt i guess there's not much more you can do if you don't have any any records anywhere so it's a case of taking what we have and actually going to the location and having a look it's definitely scared of finding out the truth um because it's just been a mystery for me for my whole life but i think there's a big part of me that wants to know if i was genuinely brought into this world with love ultimately and i was wanted and i've only had this paperwork to go by so i might be told a completely different story and that's quite a thought [Music] the address on ria's birth certificate is a village called lulalamoula but it's not marked on any map [Music] why are you going to the post office we want to check the address visit right address if the village exists it's a good sign that ria's papers are genuine lululemon [Music] thank you there is a village okay so what we're going to do we're going to the village and try to search him yeah okay okay so this is the direction to lulu okay yeah is only 40 kilometers from where they are now amma merlot when you start physically searching for that one person that you've been thinking about all your life everything you've ever known is suddenly at a tipping point what if she's never wanted anything to do with me am i a complete idiot for thinking she might want to see me again you've got all these fears and you're stepping completely into the unknown feeling quite anxious and kind of disbelieving that this is actually happening because the closer we get to the village the more real it's starting to feel there's this village yeah no this is in the village siri searches using the photo of ria's mother and the family name of rana singer the well he's informed me we have to go straight on and there are some people who knows there are few family you can try they are but they know that rana seen a family yeah recognition of the surname now makes it likely that ria's documents are in fact correct she could in theory be in any one of these houses now [Music] yes we got something what your mother's sister got married him to him yeah one of the family member [Music] shall i go first and uh to talk first yeah yeah yeah just wait yeah [Music] [Music] hey that's the family they said come it's my birth mother there i don't know you have to talk because there are few few people there okay okay uh what do you think you're physically sick do they know who i am right now they know this do they know who i am she's the youngest uncle in your family so an uncle uncle yeah ria's adoption was never a secret the whole family knew about her birth hi wasn't it they said you look like a mother your mother yeah [Laughter] you're born at 1991 she got some money to travel so there was some money left so they bought this job this is 26 years old same as you are it symbolizes me it's amazing i didn't expect to meet a whole group of people and not before i met my mother it's not just about me tall now he says much bigger picture give me a tour again it's a bedroom yes ria's family still live in the house that she was born in kitchen ah you make all the food what do you do here do you cook um it's quite shocking to think of the difference between my life and what i've created in scotland and what it would have been it makes me feel that i'm extremely privileged and gives you a good perspective it's really exciting because i've always wanted to be able to look at another human and say i can see that human in me and i've never experienced that okay okay let's go there on serious advice ria will wait until she meets her mother to hear the full story of her adoption i thought about this for so long i've had so many rejection issues for for so long my whole life i've thought that i seriously believed that they didn't want anything to do me and i was they were really ashamed to see people today actually light up and and get emotional about having me in their space and and around them that's probably the most fundamental change for me yeah tomorrow could completely prove to me that actually i was wanted and maybe it was a case of just not being in a position to have me around and that i can completely i can take and understand in colombo nima has continued leafleting some of the thousands of mothers who gave up their children are beginning to come forward one woman's story exactly matches rebecca's so this is a potential grandmother that nimal found and um this is the strongest lead we've had so far this woman's daughter who could be rebecca's mother died three months ago nimal has sent me a photo and this is the photo of the potential or the deceased mother who gave away the child there is something in the eyes there's something that just seems familiar to me um and i can see myself i can see myself being a part of this family if you see what i mean and i've never felt that before i don't know for some reason this time it's so much more different for me because i truly do want it now now i've been doing it for so long yeah i've been looking for so long the woman lives in a shantytown an hour outside colombo and has already given blood for a dna test [Music] i'm shaking my jacket very nervous [Music] okay [Music] just like rebecca this woman has been searching for her grandchild for years my chance said we are very thankful and glad to meet her i mean we are so glad we are meeting her and their family nimal can you just ask um amma what what actually happened in this story [Music] [Music] my thank you [Music] okay [Music] obviously i'm going to get the dna results but i am semi-convinced actually but i'm just not hundred percent sure um obviously because i don't want to let my own hopes down but i feel i feel a connection if that makes sense okay it will be five days before the dna results come back i'm i'm writing this letter to give to my birth mother i don't know what my the meeting's going to be like and how she's going to feel so and i want her to have something that she can keep for something she wants basically i wanted to know exactly how i feel even though i don't know her i do feel a lot of emotion when i think about her because i have because i've invested so much over the years it's built up all my life so yeah there's that already feels there is love there for her even though i don't know her so dear sumethra i can't quite believe that this day has come for many years i thought about you stayed at the one photograph i own and ate with an if i spent the first three weeks of my life simply being able to look into your eyes and know that you and my mother will give me so much comfort please know i'm always with you we may live thousands of miles apart but that will never detract from the happiness i have knowing that you are alive and well with all my love and warmth reassuming slow no [Music] just [Music] um why you thought to see your mother i was because it was painful and i want i could was thinking about her a lot and wanted to know if she was alive and who's my money [Music] so nobody can help because even her mother father was so poor taylor that i understand that completely yeah i'm gonna blow me hey i have a document that said on it that my mom didn't want any contact with me which is partly why i haven't searched and i just wondered if that was true or whether it was just something that they wrote about not to feel any guilt so i have no anger or upset i'm just happy to see her [Laughter] i learned a word in sri lankan one word amma so the true story of my adoption was that my mom had been abandoned by her boyfriend when she was pregnant she gave me to an adoption agency in colombo and said she cried for three months afterwards to know that this family has cared about me and remembered me is opposite of every fear i've had i've always been part of them just as they are now all part of me [Music] it's a beautiful family i think it's a hugely healing thing for her to come back here it feels like her energy is really really light like some pain in her is kind of lifted i absolutely feel a massive weight off my shoulders now i know his story all adds up and is accurate and she's told me things that are on the paperwork that before i've even shown her so as far as i'm concerned i don't see how it could be false it's quite a different feeling when i originally thought that nobody wanted anything to do with me over here it's a massive change i'm happy in total ria has six uncles and aunts a dozen cousins a grandfather and her mother they have already invited her back to stay i have no idea how this relationship will work from now on but i know i will come back and although scotland and sri lanka are thousands of miles apart i no longer feel stuck in between i am now very firmly rooted in both places [Music] [Music] [Music] doesn't match the mitochondrial dna polymorphisms observed upon analysis of miss rebecca peralta singham and miss hp christina did not match with each other feels like everything around us has imploded yet again i've already deleted all the pictures i've deleted everything i have i've deleted absolutely everything i don't want to look at them again so that bit's over and we start again there is a spin to this maybe somewhere in all this fate doesn't want me to have a dead mother you know to have searched for this long and end up at a grave because something tells me this isn't it i instinctively feel that when i was adopted somebody began to grieve and in the same manner that i've been searching i really truly do believe my family has been looking for me [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Real Families

Views: 312,646

Keywords: Asian heritage exploration, Real Families, adopted child story, adoptee genetic lineage, adoptee heritage journey, adoptee heritage trip, adoptee homeland visit, adoptee journey, adoptee reunion, adoptee search, adoptee stories, adoption documentary, birth family connection, birth family reunion, birth family tracing, exploring ancestry, family history journey, international adoption, lost parent documentary, search for biological family, searching for lost parents

Id: mEZq4C5X0fA

Length: 59min 15sec (3555 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 26 2021