Sometimes the reason you have to pack your bags is that you are fighting an inner war you don’t want to lose, because that would mean giving up who you are.
I am 36 and for over 20 years I have been looking for my biological roots, spending every day fighting anger, despair, lies and a sheaf of documents in which my date of birth is never recorded the same twice, from one certificate to the next. I don’t know what my real birthday is. I don’t know if the woman whose name appears in the papers is the one who gave birth to me or someone who took advantage of the chaos of the ‘90s to provide me with an identity in exchange for a commission she received for an international adoption. I don’t know if “Lucian-Ionuț Voinea” is my real name, and I refuse to use the Belgian one I received after my adoption.
In November 2021 I left Belgium with some clothes, a laptop and some old documents. I moved to Bucharest, found a job in IT, hired an attorney and set out trying to untangle the mystery of my birth and adoption. From a distance, I had been met with nothing but refusal and attempts to sweep dirt under the carpet, until I had felt I couldn’t go on living without learning the truth.
I don’t know what I packed in 1993, when I left the orphanage in Constanța to go on an organised trip to Belgium. I was seven, just a serial number on a passport, on a list with 25 other children. We didn’t know where we were going and I certainly didn’t imagine we would never come back. I was adopted by a Belgian couple who had four other children. They introduced them to me when we got to their home. I didn’t understand why they had taken in a child from Romania, nor why their family was so big. For a while, I also didn’t understand that would be my home. I kept wondering when we would go back.
I never felt like a true member of the family, and I endured a lot of abuse from the other children in the household. As a teenager, I started to ask, obsessively, who my parents had been. That is when I was shown the black passport with which I had left Romania – a dash instead of the father’s name, and an unknown name in the “Mother” box.
I kept insisting, so my adoptive family brought me to Romania so I could meet that woman. I was so excited, imagining all sorts of scenarios for the moment when she would hug me and I would know that she was my mother. The woman appeared, holding a flower, as if attending a funeral. We didn’t look alike at all. She shook my hand and I told the Belgians she was not my mother.
When I became an adult, I began searching for answers on my own, because my adoptive family refused to support me. I obtained information with great difficulty, through attorneys who cost me huge sums of money. Each time I show someone the collection of yellowed papers on which the typewriter ink has smeared on the corners, people’s faces fall. One document claims I was born on the 20th of June 1986, another says it was the 20th of July. All these papers, including the one recording my birth in a hospital in Cernavodă, where I am supposed to have been found after my mother abandoned me, date back from 1993, the year when I left on that trip to Belgium with no return date. That is the luggage left for me by the childcare institutions of the Romania of the 1990s: a heap of confusing documents, contradicting each other, and the passport with which I left the country.
This summer, the National Authority for Child Rights Protection and Adoption in Romania contacted my alleged biological mother. During the meeting, she told the authorities that I was not her son and that I was passed to her by nurses at the Cernavodă Hospital because my real mother had died in labour.
This is all I managed to learn: “Your biological mother later refused to sign a statement confirming her verbal declarations, did not want to leave her phone number and refused to sign the personal data processing agreement. This being the case, we cannot provide you with the lady’s contact information.”
Things being as they are, I can’t yet pack my bags and leave Romania. I will continue to press on in search of answers. Somewhere there must be a real document from 1986, the year when I was born. I want to learn if I have any living biological family, I want to know the truth about my roots, and if my adoption was in fact the result of a string of acts of corruption, I want this truth to be recognised by all those involved. Some of the children on the list of participants to that trip in 1993 have left us. They have stepped out of life, drowned in confusion and depression. Few had the fortune of balanced, loving adoptive families.
My story and that of many other children who were adopted in unclear, corrupt circumstances is a baggage of the old system, and I refuse to be a party to its dissimulation.
Testimony collected by Ana-Maria Ciobanu for the Museum of Abandonment, for the Abandonment Baggage campaign. This project is financed by CARE through the Sera Foundation, Care France, and FONPC..