The search goes on

Dear readers,

About a month ago, I reported on my blog about a friend who was searching for his birth mother and relatives in Guatemala. He was adopted at birth, during Guatemala’s civil war, and grew in the US. He is now on a journey to find out who is family are. I will call him JD (not to be confused with Jack Daniels, but it would be funny if he had a partner called Coke). While I try and make the blog uniquely Catracho/Brit, there deserves to be some Chapine in there as well.

He has been posting his revelations on Facebook. Please find them below.

September 20th, 2014

The last two days have been filled with adventure and beauty, success and frustration. In many ways those words embody an archetype of my perception of Latin America.

Day 1: Visited the Civil Registry. I was able to get my own birth certificate, which is a huge step in getting my own national id. My mother, father, nor brother are in the system of birth certificates and have not registered for national ids.

Day 2: Visited two other government offices – taxes and national census. Again no family can be found in the records. Also, learned of a legal technicality affecting my own national id, unless I want to have my last name represented incorrectly.

Ni modo. I have already spent amazing time in Guatemala trying new street food, riding chicken buses, and taking in the amazing and colorful sights and sounds. Now off to more Guate adventuring!

 

 

September 23rd, 2014

A great day of progress.

1st, I finalized my application for my national id. Not sure if my last name will be represented incorrectly, but I will have the official doc in 30 days.

2nd, visited the hospital that attended my mother in 1984. It was so interesting to visit and think she and I had been there years before. The medical record dept was helpful and the oldest employee there looked for my mother’s file. After 10 years, documents are discarded so the record books from ’84 were no longer in existence.

3rd, I visited a girl’s home that had cared for one of my sisters. The director, a sharp woman who had worked there for 25 years, read all of my documents and was supportive of my cause. Unfortunately, they also had not kept old records. But, they started calling girls who had grown up in the home and may have known my sister. They assured me that there was great hope I would find my mother.

 

September 25th, 2014

New clues! They found two of my siblings in the national database, finally! So I have two new birthdates, and places of origin to pursue.

Everything is pointing towards a department about 3 hours west, where I plan to visit Sunday.

Yesterday I returned to my mother’s town of origin. The municipality was super helpful trying to locate documents and also calling all their family asking if my mother’s last name sounded familiar.

Tomorrow I return there to take a truck another hour into the mountains to a community where all of the people with that last name live.

The adventure continues!

 

September 26th, 2014

Hot on the trail!

Today we found the data for a third sibling, my oldest sister. Better than just finding her data, we learned that she had updated her national id within the past couple of years. The local national registry office would not give me her address over the phone, but I can request it in person.

The documents I have say that my mother and father had lived in a department 3 hours west of where I am staying in the capital. The recently acquired documentation on my siblings lists them as having been born in the same area. And, as of a couple of years ago, my oldest sister was still living there.

Much like in the US, in small towns, everyone knows everyone. At this point in the search, it is a matter of showing up in the community and asking if anyone recognizes my mother’s or siblings’ names. Last week I was not sure they would still be there, but after these recent clues I have a strong feeling that they are there. If I find one of my sisters or brothers, it is almost guaranteed they will be able to connect me with my mother.

I am dying of anticipation to get on a bus and go, but I will wait until Sunday when I have someone to accompany me on my journey. Hopefully I find a sibling just by asking around, but if not, Monday I can visit the local national registry and ask for my sister’s address. Either way, the future is looking bright.

 

September 30th, 2014

Well, these last few days were not quite what I expected. The towns I visited were a lot bigger than I had imagined – “pueblos” in Guatemala are nothing like the pueblos I know from Nicaragua.

It was surreal being there, because of the thought that any person could be a relative in some distant way.

Asking around the community for my parents and siblings led to a lot of dead end clues. I am not sure if that means we did not ask the right person, or if it means none of them are still living in the town. It could also mean that they are in the area, but in a smaller little community in the country side.

On the upside, I still have new clues. The local national registry gave me the address information for my oldest sister. Turns out she did register for an id update in the last year and listed the community and neighborhood where she lives. On the downside, at that time she was living on the border with Belize a couple of days travel away by bus. Fortunately, I have a contact there who is helping me ask around for her.

Hopefully they will connect.

“The Search”

Dear readers,

I don’t want to sound soppy, but every single person in life has a journey. Nobody has a perfect journey. If they do, they are a bit boring in my opinion. Highs and lows like a roller coaster and all that. What I love in my life are chance meetings with people who’ve gone through something tragic, and coming out the other side still smiling, or on a positive journey to find themselves. I went through quite a serious bout depression about 13 years ago which left me with suicidal thoughts, but I climbed out of it over time, and I now look back on it with pride of having escaped it. In my case, I was just lost and overwhelmed with life. But when I compare to other people’s experiences, it doesn’t seem that bad. My mother and father went through one hell of a time in their youth, but they raised a great family, had wonderful jobs and are now happily retired. They are a true inspiration.

Two years ago, through meeting friends of friends, I came across a fantastic guy who would like to be known by his initials JD. He was working for a US organisation with my Irish Catracha sister, Hazel. I met him a handful of times. As always in life, we run around in circles and we don’t always get to catch up as much as we want with friends, but whenever we did, we got on well and I thought he was a top bloke. I remember one of the first times I met him, he told me he was Guatemalan but his Spanish wasn’t great (no offense, mine was a bit rusty at the time as well!). It confused me a little, and I think he caught on to my confused face and told me that he was adopted when he was very young and was brought up in the USA. Even though there are many millions of cases like this, it always blows your mind. You can’t imagine the complexity of emotions that the person went through. But JD was always a friendly, positive person and was a good laugh, but I did have a feeling that he was on sort of journey to know himself and his background a lot more. He didn’t say anything. I just felt that. In a positive way of course, and I remembered telling myself that. I often wonder if this was telepathically transmitted to him. I hope it was anyway. It was at the back of my mind, and then today he decided to put the information of his search online. Having read it, I asked permission if I can put it on my blog to share with you. It is very moving, but one of courage as well. A wonderful journey.

JD said that if you are looking for your biological family in Guatemala and have any questions or would like to discuss his experience, feel free to leave me a comment and I will pass it on to him.
Special thank you to JD.

The Search

I was adopted from Guatemala when I was four months old and grew up all of my life in the United States.” I have used this line countless times in my two years living and working in Central America. To the person asking the question,this is an explanation of why my skin is brown and my Spanish is different, but to me, it is an explanation of exactly why I am here, currently in the middle-of-nowhere Latin America.

I always knew I was adopted from Guatemala. I remember sitting at the kitchen table when my parents asked me if I would like to have a sister. I remember them leaving me at my grandparent’s house while they flew to Guatemala to pick her up. I remember, one of those photo memories, when my grandparents took me home and my sister was there playing on a light yellow blanket on the living room floor.

My parents cultivated a Mayan pride in my sister and I by making sure we watched all of the TV specials about the Maya on PBS and by collecting all of the National Geographic magazines with Maya articles. I had a hand-made doll and a Tikal t-shirt as souvenirs from Guatemala.

I understood I was Guatemalan, and yet, for almost seventeen years of my life, I never considered or questioned my roots. People used to ask me if I ever wondered about my biological parents and I would tell them, “No, my parents are my parents. I don’t think about it.” And I didn’t think about it, at least not until one night when a friend, who oddly enough is much more like a second mother, planted a seed that changed it all.

I always thought finding my biological mother was about me – about finding some sense of closure – until that night when my friend said, “Maybe she wants to know you are all right. That she made the right choice.” It hit home with me,mostly, I think, because I could infer by her tone and the look on her face that she had given up a child for adoption and wanted to know that she had made the right choice.

I never fault my biological mother for giving me up for adoption. I grew up in a wonderful safe home and had a childhood full of mystery books, Sesame Street, Legos,and countless other adventures and opportunities, not to mention good medical care and sufficient nutrition. In undergrad, I read a UN report that cited 1984, the year of my birth, as the year with the highest number of deaths,murders and disappearances, during the Guatemalan civil war. Now that I live in Latin America, I am intimately familiar with the poverty and hardship from which my mother’s decision spared me. Her choice to give me up was just a choice, one that I understand and for which I am grateful.

I have often thought about meeting my mother since the seed was planted twelve years ago. You could even say my life revolved around the realization of that dream. In some way or another, my pastimes, studies, and career moves were all directed at gaining the skills and abilities that would allow me to get on a plane to Guatemala and start searching. When I accepted a job that required I move to Honduras, I knew I was close – literally a country away.

In 2013, I made monumental progress toward the goal of finding my mother when I visited the orphanage that handled my adoption in Guatemala. Through the wonders of Google I was able to place a call, send an email, ride some rickety buses, and before I knew it, I was sitting in a room at the Agua Viva Children’s Home in Chimaltenango, Guatemala with a folder of documents I had never seen before spread out in front of me.

I have seven siblings – three half brothers, three half sisters, and a full brother who is only a year and six months older than I am. My mother gave me up for adoption when she was thirty-three years old. She was illiterate. She had been married and her husband passed away leaving her with five mouths to feed.Her next husband left her and went to the US. My father was abusive, alcoholic,and provided no economic assistance.

My mother left my father while she was eight months pregnant with me, taking my seven siblings with her. She did not have a place to stay. She found work in tortilla factories, earning less than $1 a day. They moved around a lot, went hungry, and slept on floors.

Soon after leaving, my mother contracted malaria and was hospitalized. This is how Agua Viva, the children’s home, became involved and how this story, my story,came to be. The documents explain that Agua Viva cared for her in the days following the birth, and saw to my sibling’s temporary placement into several homes while she decided what to do in the future. One of her decisions was to give me up for adoption and the chance for a better life.

I obtained a wealth of identifying information for my mother, my siblings, even my father,who I had never before considered finding. I have the names of the towns where my mother and father are from. Unfortunately, I do not have anyone’s national ID number, the one key that could unlock the puzzle of their current location.

I only had five days in Guatemala on that trip. I had come so much closer, yet I had to leave before I could follow-up on all of my newly acquired leads.

At this point, August 2014, there is really only one thing left to do. I made my decision two weeks ago.
I am going to Guatemala to find my family, to dedicate myself to the search until it reaches an end. It could take time – time standing in lines to deal with bureaucracy, time riding on buses, time visiting my parent’s towns. Or maybe it will take no time at all. Maybe the search will end with me laying a lily on a gravestone. Either way, I am not stopping until I know that I have given it my best effort.

When I find my mother, if she is still alive, I am not going to barge in to her life.I am going to send her a note asking if she would like to meet me. I hope she says yes, but if she says no, well, then she says no.

I do not have the expectation of tearful greetings and warm hugs. That could happen,but the experience could also be quite sad. Even if she is happy to see me,perhaps it will be a painful reminder of the difficult past.

I am not going to ask my mother why she did it, why she gave me up. I have a good idea about why she made that decision. I am going to ask about her life after1984. I will tell her about Pinckneyville, where I grew up, about my first visit to Guatemala, about going to grad school in New York, and about my latest work and travels. More importantly, I will tell her how I spent the last twelve years wondering about and planning to find her.

After the potential meeting, that imagined first conversation, lies an unknown. I can imagine events that could happen, but I have no idea. The possibilities are limitless. Maybe I will leave the encounter having met brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and an entire family I never knew existed. Maybe we will part ways with a hug and no plans to meet again.

The amazing thing is, in less than a month, I am going to Guatemala to find out. I have a place to stay, contact with an attorney, a search plan, and a page full of addresses and leads to follow. My story will no longer be centered on my birth and adoption from Guatemala, nor on my perpetual journey to find my biological mother. With all good fortune and a blessing from the stars, I am writing the final chapters of that story, and in a few short weeks, a new story will begin– the story of my life after having met my biological mother.

End

JD said that if you are looking for your biological family in Guatemala and have any questions or would like to discuss his experience, feel free to leave me a comment and I will pass it on to him.

Central American Adventure – Part Three

Hello all

Saturday 19th November 2011

Got up reasonably early. I can’t remember what we had for breakfast. If my folks get round to reading this, maybe they can remember. I was a bit sick to death of Mayan things so I demanded we go somewhere far more entertaining: Macaw Mountain. We bought some lychees, which for the last few months have been sold in abundance in Honduras. When I think of lychees, I think of Monty Python song, “I like Chinese”.

It started off rainy. It took a while to get there on a windy road that was still being made. The vegetation, like always, was tropical, fresh, green rolling hills and oxygen seeping into our lungs, and the wonderful scents of wood burning from the houses nearby. I have said green rolling hills a lot in my blog updates. There are a lot of them here! Copan, even though it caters for tourists, has a lot of poverty too. On the road up to Macaw mountain, there were kids playing with broken bicycle wheels and houses that had tin roofs and the ground was just dirt. Still the people were friendly and still did they have smiles on their faces.

We got to Macaw mountain. It is a sanctuary for ill or abandoned parrots and other birds that have been found in terrible conditions or sent by owners who can’t care for them anymore. It was set up by an American who lived on the island Roatan but everything was moved to Copan so the birds could live in their natural habitat. If the birds are able enough, they are set free. Otherwise, they live in huge aviaries and seem very happy. They keep only birds from Central America. The first thing I wanted when I got there was food. I had a built a great hunger and the lychees just weren’t doing it for me. So we went to the restaurant on-site and I had some grilled, which were wonderful. I also tasted their stewed beans, which were the best beans I’d had since I’ve been in Honduras. I complimented the chef on her beans and she gave me a small bucket full of them to eat. We went around the park and I gave some of the birds lychees. They might have had the squits. Oh well. There were some wonderful views of the river valley. It was a proper tropical rain forest. There were also lots of large spiders to scare mum, which was fun. Somehow, a macaw parrot effortlessly made a three holes in my black polo shirt. I couldn’t exactly stop it because I was holding three big heavy parrots with big sharp beaks. They looked a bit menacing. Mum and dad also did nothing to stop them, but the man supervising did stop them before they ripped off the chest buttons.

 

 

We went for coffee and then took a motor-taxi back into the centre of Copan. I then went to buy a corn on the cob from a street vendor. Lovely. Grilled to perfection. Had salt on it. We then went back to Casa de Cafe, had a rest in the hammocks. I scoffed the beans in the afternoon. Big mistake, as I was going to find out. That night we went out for dinner, again with Susan, at the same place we went to on the first night. I can’t remember what I had to eat, but it was great talking to an expert like Susan about the movies. It sounded a dream life, promoting movies, meeting famous film icons and living in New York, going to film festivals around the world and seeing great beautiful pìctures before anyone else did. Most envious, I must say, but it did sound stressful as well.

That night I went to sleep, making the grand mistake of not locking my door. The next morning would be an early start. 6am. We were on our way up through Guatemala with the hope of getting the 1:30pm bus from Puerto Barrios to Punta Gorda in Belize.

 

Sunday 20th November 2011

Got up. About 5am. Packed the last few things into my rucksack. When it came to packing my camera. Where is it? Shit. I went through my room and my bag a couple of times. My watch, given to me by my good friend Alyena Rahman, an old colleague of mine. Not there. It was one of those horrid gut wrenching feelings of regret and stupidity of not locking my door. My mum had told me to. I had to get the shuttle bus to Rio Hondas in Guatemala. I just had to let it go. My folks had heard that there was a circus in town and possibly someone who went to it could have just tried their luck. But I look back and of course blame myself. Copan is relaxed. It is very easy to take your guard off and forget where you are, especially if you have spent the last year in Tegucigalpa where you have to be on constant alert. Copan has a lot of poverty, as stated above. I must have been easy pickings.

Once on the bus, I felt the stabs of anger at myself, as the bus served around mountain roads, which made me want to vomit. It could have been a case of overdosing on the beans the day before, mentioned my parents. At the time I refused to believe it. I think back now and they were probably right. Guatemala was the third Central American country that I’d been to. Unfortunately the loss of my camera over-shadowed having a new Chapine stamp in my passport.

We got to Rios Hondos and waited at a big transit junction while we waited for a man in a white tshirt to point us on to get the bus to Puerto Barrios. It was a bit dodgy, with a few travellers weighing us up for how much wealth we might have. I was busy searching my bags once more to make sure that I hadn’t packed my camera. No use. I forgot that my mum and dad were kind of new to all this, being eyed up for their wealth, and I felt bad. I’m used to it in Tegus and I can block it off. Mum and dad can’t. I think back and remember how nervous they looked. I should have looked after them a bit more. Anyway, the bloke in the white tshirt came back and pointed us to a bus. It was a public bus which was slow and rickety. A far cry from Hedman Alas. We got on and I started to sleep. It was one of the worst journeys of my life. I had picked up something. I had a headache and felt even more sick. The heat got to me. We got out at Puerto Barrios about six hours later. Somewhere along the journey, a man got on the bus selling some sort of medication or cream. He looked a dodgy looking man in his brown striped shirt, slicked backed pony-tail and shifty expression. It was the first time mum and dad had seen it. I’d seen it plenty on Tegus’ buses. They were fascinated, especially at the amount of people who chose to buy it. Mum and dad were desperate to get to Punta Gorda that day, especially after seeing and hearing about the dark sides of Puerto Barrios. We approached a taxi driver when we got off the bus. Suddenly, whatever bug it was hit me. I vomited everywhere, while my folks had to negotiate a taxi fare with absolutely no Spanish. The beans mum and dad said. I didn’t know or care. I just wanted to get some water in me and go to sleep.

We managed to get a boat to Punta Gorda within an hour or so to spare. We sat in a dodgy bar while a drunk man tried to chat to me. My patience was nowhere near polite and I think I ignored him completely. Poor drunk guy. One funny think is, I was Chapine for one day. My stamp states that I upped and left Guatemala on the same day. 20th November. The sea breeze might help my sickness. It didn’t though. My headache got worse. I looked at the horizon. My brother had told me many moons ago to stare at the horizon to cure sea sickness. I suppose that worked, even though the sea wasn’t that rough. We got to Punta Gorda and we managed to the hotel, the Coral Inn (or something like that). I pretty much dived on the bed and went to sleep for a bit. Mum and dad tried to get fluids and food down me but I couldn’t stand the sight of either. I pretty much ignored the neighbours as we went into the room, Will and Felicita  (or something like it, my mind was very hazy).

Anyway, that was me finished for the day, more or less. 4pm on-wards I was dead to the world. First day in Belize. It was the third time in my life that I had been in three different countries in one day. The first was France, Switzerland, Italy. The second was England, France, Belgium. Now, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize. I  take great satisfaction of getting as many stamps from different countries in my passport. I guess everyone does. I want it coated in stamps.

Tomorrow, my birthday!