How Amanda from Weert discovered that her sister was not related and her birth certificate was false: 'It's like the ground is disappearing beneath your feet'

Newgein/Weert -

Amanda Janssen, adopted as a baby from Sri Lanka, had a carefree childhood in a family in Weert. The shock was great when she discovered that her birth certificate was false and that her sister who came along was not a family member. She now heads a foundation that uses DNA kits to help other adopted children find their biological family. She herself is still searching in vain.

Today at 18:45 Roel Wiche

How old are you actually? When Amanda Janssen is asked that question, it is always an awkward moment. The only thing she knows for sure is that she was adopted from Sri Lanka to a family in Weert in February 1985. But every other trail to her origins has so far been a dead end: her identity papers turned out to be false, just like those of thousands of other children who were adopted at the time. "I don't know my roots, but I do exist. That makes it very complicated. As if the ground is disappearing beneath your feet. Who am I?"

Let's keep her age at 39, says Amanda, as she extinguishes the oriental incense sticks in her apartment in Nieuwegein and serves coffee on the balcony. Her ruby-red, authentic Sri Lankan dress sparkles in the sunlight. She tells her story at a time when adoption is all over the news: the Netherlands has immediately imposed a stop because the Lower House fears a repeat of past abuses. In Sri Lanka in particular, there was large-scale adoption fraud. The documents of no fewer than 2,300 of the 3,500 adopted children who came to our country were allegedly forged, revealed the TV programme Zembla a few years ago.

ORDER FORM

Amanda Janssen was brought to Weert as a baby, together with her three-year-older sister, by a couple who could not have children. Her adoptive parents had a long search behind them in the adoption circuit, which in the eighties was teeming with organisations with rather shady, remarkable methods. For example, they had to fill out a kind of 'order form' on which they could state their wishes in detail: whether or not to have a Negroid child, whether or not to have a disability, a boy or a girl, a child from Korea, India, Indonesia, South America or another country. 'My parents filled it out in good faith. Like many people at the time, they trusted that everything would be legal. No one thought: this could be wrong. Adoption was also generally accepted - the children would have a better future, that was the idea. And I also had a carefree childhood in Weert. I was crazy about carrot mash and Limburg pie. I never felt different.'

RUNNER

It is only when she has long since left home that Amanda discovers how her identity and papers have been tampered with. When she is pregnant with her daughter Tess in 2016, the midwife asks her if there are any hereditary diseases in her family. This is so confronting that she starts looking for her roots in Sri Lanka. There she makes a number of discoveries that turn her life upside down. In the hospital in the capital Colombo that is on the copy of her birth certificate, her name does not appear anywhere in the archive. With the help of a local guide, she does find her birth certificate in another hospital, hundreds of kilometres away. This puts her on the trail, or so she thinks, of her biological family. But when she looks them up, she is in for a huge shock.

"The family actually knew everything. The certificate turned out to be from my adopted sister. She and her younger sister had been given up for adoption. Through a recruiter at the local market who had said: we need children. A DNA test confirmed that my adopted sister was not my real sister. Apparently, two babies had been switched somewhere, so that I ended up in the Netherlands with her. But where was my family then? I have no date of birth, I don't know my real name. I still don't."

While she herself is still searching, in 2017, after the revelations of Zembla , she and several fellow sufferers set up the Sri Lanka DNA foundation. With the aim of matching adopted children in the Netherlands with their families on their birth island via DNA test kits. Since then, Amanda has traveled to Sri Lanka every year for the work of her organization. There, she hears one harrowing story after another about the illegal adoption practices of the past.

"The consequences for mothers have certainly been neglected for a long time. They thought they were giving their child a better future, but the rupture of the family bond was terrible. Hardly anywhere else is society as family-oriented as in Sri Lanka. I spoke to a mother who was still breastfeeding her baby at the airport. The doors of the plane slammed shut and her child was gone for good. Other mothers told me: I went with a full belly and came back with an empty belly. That is heartbreaking."

CONSOLATION

Sri Lanka DNA has now made 45 matches between adopted children and biological mothers. Several hundred adoptees and mothers from Sri Lanka are still busy with their search. For Amanda Janssen it has now become a full-time job. And she has gained a whole community of fellow sufferers where she can find support and comfort and express her emotions. Because her own search for her true identity, fundamental to every human being, is still ongoing. "Sometimes it is nice when someone recognizes your story, someone to whom you can say: so you have that too? Then you just feel a little less crazy."

HUNDREDS OF ADOPTED CHILDREN FROM SRI LANKA IN LIMBURG

Amanda Janssen's adoptive parents, who still live in Weert, say when asked that they have no need to respond to this story. In the 1970s and 1980s, Dutch families adopted some 3,500 children from Sri Lanka. It is estimated that several hundred of them ended up in Limburg.