She just held onto me and wouldn't let go and just kept crying and apologizing.' 'My mother was waiting for me when I got off the plane,' he said. Molokie said he also had a powerfully emotional reunion with his family in Chile when he went there this month. 'I'm very happy that God gave me the opportunity and put my daughter in my path because I asked God on my knees to put my daughter in a dream so I could meet her and tell her everything.' 'I never imagined I would find her,' she said. Getting to hold her for the first time in more than 40 years felt like a miracle. 'I went there not knowing what to expect, and when I left, I felt like a piece of like my heart and soul was left there.'Īs for her birth mother, Valdes said she 'cried with grief and with joy' when she finally found out what had happened to her daughter. 'I was a nervous wreck to go down there,' Smolka said. She worked with her adopted mother to put together an album of photos showing Smolka growing up in New York so that her birth mother could see how she was raised. Smolka went for a week in February, not only reuniting with her mother but also meeting four sisters, a brother and 10 nieces and nephews for the first time. Since learning the truth about their adoptions, both Smolka and Molokie have reunited with their families in Chile. “It’s awesome for us because it’s about changing lives.” Reunited In all, six cases have been resolved as a result of the same USA TODAY story that Molokie read, said Constanza del Río, founder and president of Nos Buscamos. She never told a soul what had happened until Molokie and Nos Buscamos had found her. Once she gave birth, they took him away, telling her she couldn’t support the baby on her own. Molokie’s mother would come to tell him that her sisters brought her to a halfway house when she was 4 months pregnant and that she was held captive until she had the baby. Within a half hour the agency got back to him and said they knew where his birth mother was. Molokie said the story made him wonder about his own adoption and that he decided to reach out to Nos Buscamos, an NGO dedicated to reuniting stolen children with their Chilean families. He read a report by USA TODAY about a California man who got to meet his sister in Chile after finding out he had had been stolen from his mother in the 1980s. Like Smolka, Matt Molokie was going about his daily routine when he came across a story that would change his life. “On her birthday, I would silently tell her, ‘Happy birthday.’ I never missed a birthday.” 28 marked the year because it was my daughter’s birthday,” Valdes told USA TODAY from her home in Chile. While Valdes grieved, Smolka was being raised in New York by adoptive parents who had no idea their baby had been stolen from her mother.Īlthough Valdes eventually learned the truth that her baby was alive, she had no way to find out where she was or why she’d been stolen. 28, 1981, Valdes said she got to hold her newborn daughter only once before the midwife took her away, later telling her the baby had asphyxiated and died. She was unmarried but she was going to figure it out, she was going to be a good mom.Īfter giving birth on Nov. In reality, Valdes told USA TODAY that she had been looking forward to having a baby she wasn’t raped like the paperwork said. In the U.S., more than 40 of the adoptees have formed a support network where they can share their pasts and their pain, and find comfort in knowing they’re not alone.Ĭhile's stolen children: How they were taken and adopted to families in the US and beyond 40 birthdays apartįor 40 years, Rachel Smolka believed she had a typical adoption story: Her birth mother, Karina del Carmen Valdes Lara, simply couldn’t take care of her and decided she’d be better off with another family. They’ve not only formed a unique friendship out of their tragic pasts, but they are also part of a growing community of people who’ve learned the truth about their adoptions in Chile and reconnected with their birth families. Smolka and Molokie were strangers until two months ago when they learned of their similar pasts and remarkably, that they grew up just 20 minutes from each other on Staten Island, New York. Matt Molokie’s papers said his mother got pregnant at 18 and had decided to give her son a better life by putting him up for adoption.īoth Smolka and Molokie recently confirmed that they were stolen from their single, low-income mothers in Chile in the 1980s. Other forms said she had no father or mother at all and had been abandoned. Rachel Smolka’s adoption paperwork said she was the result of a rape and that her single mother didn’t want to raise a baby alone. Watch Video: American adoptees stolen from Chile as babies connect with their past

Wreck this journal for adults