Woman Reunites with Colombian Mother After 30 Years
“A woman was reunited with her birth parents more than 20 years after they put her up for adoption in the hope she would escape a life of extreme poverty.
Christina Barlow, 28, was placed in a Bogota orphanage by her parents, Encarnacion and Alcibiades, who already had three children and had been left homeless by civil war.
She was adopted at just a few days old by a British couple, Steve and Jane, and brought back to the UK to be raised at their home in Berkshire.
When Jane died in 2011, Christina, then in her early 20s, vowed to trace her birth mother, knowing that she had sacrificed her own happiness in the hope of giving her daughter a better life.
She later enlisted the help of ITV’s Long Lost Family, whose team used information on Christina’s birth certificate to track down Encarnacion to her home 5,000 miles away. Cameras followed as Christina made the journey across the globe to meet her birth parents for the first time.
Hugging them in a Colombian hotel, Christina said: ‘Thank you for doing that very painful thing because it’s meant that I’ve had an amazing life.’
Alcibiades and Encarnacion admitted they had been terrified ahead of the meeting, fearing Christina would be angry and reject them for giving her up.
But they broke down in tears when they saw their daughter, now a dance teacher, rushing to give them a hug.
‘My beautiful daughter,’ Alcibiades said as he tearfully kissed her head.
Encarnacion, who admitted she was ‘frozen’ in fear as she waited to meet Christina, told her: ‘I didn’t think I ever would see you grown up. You were just a baby.’
Steve and Jane, whose younger daughter Gabriella, was also adopted from Colombia, raised Christina to understand the difficult situation her family had been when she was born.
However they had wrongly been told that Encarnacion was a single mother, and that Christina’s father had not been in the picture.
In reality the couple were married with three children when Encarnacion fell pregnant with Christina. Without a roof over their heads and already struggling to survive, the couple decided to place their youngest child in an orphanage.
Encarnacion was given just a few precious moments with her newborn daughter before she was taken into care, while Alcibiades was not at the hospital when she was born and so never had the chance to meet her – leading to the assumption that he was not involved.
When Christina lost her mother Jane seven years ago following a long illness, she decided it was the right time to track Encarnacion down.
Christina’s parents had always told her everything they knew about her birth parents and the place she came from.
Christina said: ‘She made the ultimate sacrifice to give me a better life, she must have carried that around with her. I need to know she’s OK and tell her I had a great life. It’s up to me to reach out to find her.’
Long Lost Family managed to track Encarnacion down using her social ID number and found that she was living two hours away from the orphanage in Bogotá from where Christina was adopted.
When Encarnacion and Alcibiades were shown a picture of Christina they were in disbelief, as they thought they would never hear from her again.
Christina, who made the journey with husband Jeremy, 34, an actor, was left shocked when she was told her father was also alive.
Encarnacion said: ‘I would ask God that the day would come to perform a little miracle and that she’d appear.’
Despite never having met, the family soon formed a close bond.
‘I feared that she would reject me. I just froze I couldn’t even more from the nerves,’ Encarnacion continued.
‘So now I feel it’s got less she when told me not to worry she still thought of me as her mum.’
The family have vowed to stay in touch and Christina is planning to visit them in Colombia again.
Despite the couple’s humble way of life, Alcibiades gifted Christina his watch so she would remember him when she was back in the UK.”
[Daily Mail 7/17/18 by Molly Rose Pike]
REFORM Puzzle Piece
Recent Comments