A 42-year-old Virginia man got to embrace his birth mother for the first time during a long-awaited family reunion in Valdivia, Chile.
“It knocked the wind out of me. ... I was suffocated by the gravity of this moment,” Thyden told The Associated Press in a video call after the reunion. “How do you hug someone in a way that makes up for 42 years of hugs?”
“The real story was these kids were stolen from poor families, poor women that didn’t know. They didn’t know how to defend themselves,” said Constanza del Rio, founder and director and Nos Buscamos. Nos Buscamos has been partnering for two years with genealogy platform MyHeritage, which provides free at-home DNA testing kits for distribution to Chilean adoptees and suspected victims of child trafficking in Chile.
Stepping into his mother’s home, Thyden was greeted with 42 colorful balloons, each one signifying a year of lost time with his Chilean family. “My parents wanted a family but they never wanted it like this,” he said. “Not at the extortion of another, the robbing of another.”While Thyden was successfully reunited with his birth family, he recognizes that reunification might not go as well for other adoptees.
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