When international adoptee Marcia Engel set out to find her biological parents, she found that the system wasn’t geared to helping her—and that intermediary bodies were even exploiting her quest.

Her response was to create a network to give families the opportunity to reunite without having to resort to paying for help.

“I wanted to have this free registration system,” said Engel. “It is important that adoptees and their parents have the option to search for one another. currently, parents and adoptees have little information and they always experience bumps in the road, dead ends.”

Engel’s newly launched Adoption Angels Network (adoptionangelsnetwork.com) is part of her initiative, Plan Angel, created after a long and torturous search for her biological parents.

“I found out that I was adopted when I was 11,” she said. “My mother told me that I didn’t come out her stomach. she told me that there wasn’t any information on my background and that even if I wanted to look for it, it wasn’t possible.”

Still, she persisted, partly out of a feeling of alienation: “I felt lonely,” she recalled. “People asked why I looked different from my sister who had blond hair and blue eyes. I felt angry as I felt that nature had simply made me look different and they shouldn’t question it.”

A difficult search

Engel began to search the house and found some papers, dated 1981, which mentioned a Martha Patricia Ramirez. “As my name was Marcia Engel, I thought that another child had passed through the house,” she recalled.

Engel eventually learned that she was brought to an orphanage in Columbia as a one-year old. they didn’t know much about her, not even her birth date. she was adopted a year later by Dutch parents.

She started trying to look in earnest in 1999 using the Spoorloos programme (spoorloos.kro.nl). In the end the organization sent her a letter saying that they couldn’t help.

“For many years I thought it wasn’t possible to look for my roots,” she said. “I never imagined that my parents in Colombia would think about me or search for me. As I didn’t think that my parents really thought about me, I didn’t go further.”

Engel decided to try again in 2005 and telephoned the orphanage in Colombia noted in her adoption papers: “They sent me back my mother’s name and the name of a correspondent from Spoorloos, who could help me with my search. I had to pay around 600 euros for the service.”

Within four months, Engel had found her biological family and, after corresponding with them by phone and Internet for eight months, she made the trip to the land of her birth.

Meeting the family

Often, the reunion doesn’t go one might expect, say many adoptees who have found their biological parents.

“It was a beautiful experience but it wasn’t what I’d dreamed about,” recalled Engel. “My biological mother told me her story: when I was eleven months old, she left me with a women and the government took me from her. The actual story was that she left me when I was two months old with a friend of hers — she was only seventeen. The friend took me to the police and I ended up in the orphanage.”

Engel also detailed how her father found out via her grandmother that Engel was in the orphanage and went to find her — he already had Engel’s older brother whom Engel’s mother had given birth to when she was 14 years old. But her father learned that she had already been adopted by people living in a foreign country.

Crossing borders: A family quest