Help Pete Meet His Birth Family!
Donation protected
UPDATE FROM PETE:
Hello, everyone! I wanted to thank you for all of the emotional and monetary support, love, and care during this adoption journey and lifechanging trip to Chile to connect with my roots. After over a decade of searching for answers about my origins, I learned that I was kidnapped and trafficked into an illegal adoption during the Pinochet dictatorship. This news has rocked my adoptive and birth families in many ways. Having the opportunity to start building relationships with my birth family, as well as heal with my adoptive family has been incredibly powerful. Not only do I have many answers now, but I am able to start finding my whole self.
I traveled to Chile on February 17, 2024, for a week. It was a whirlwind experience - not much sleep to be had! When I disembarked the airplane in Santiago, I was met by news media, who documented my first in-person meeting with my birth mom, Mariza. We rushed towards one another, and I embraced her with open arms and an open heart. After over 40 years of believing her son had passed away with no answers or closure, mom had her son back.
During the 7-day trip, I reconnected not just with my birth mother, but also with many other important people in this new part of my life. I spent time with my brother Jorge and his wife Jessika, as well as my niece Amelia, who loved the gifts I brought her. Nico and Caesar were amazing translators during my time in Chile, volunteering so much of their time to help with communication. Barbara helped mediate difficult conversations, as this was an emotionally intense visit. This helped assure all involved that more visits would happen in the future, and the connections made are life-long. I was also able to connect with other adoptees on this same journey - Maria, Ben, Emily, and Sean. Our birth parents were able to exchange contact information in order to expand their support systems after we returned to the United States.
This reconnection is still very surreal for all of us involved, and finding our new normal will take time. Because of your support, beginning this incredibly special and happy journey was possible and will continue on with more media in the U.S. I can't thank you all enough for showing up during this time in my life. I will continue paying it forward with outreach via news media interviews, not only for other adoptees on their journeys, but also to shine a light on this humanitarian crisis to work toward a world where this can't happen again.
———————————————
My dear friend Pete has had quite the 10-year journey to find his birth family and roots. Though it started as a typical adoptee-searching-for-his-birth-family journey, it soon turned into unraveling a decades long human-trafficking operation under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. What initially seemed like a case of a few hundred illegally adopted Chilean children, it has now grown to over 20,000 children trafficked right after birth into adoptions around the world. Pete was confirmed one of those children.
Over the past few months, he has not only been DNA-matched to his birth mother (who was told Pete died at birth), but he met her via zoom and learned of his 4 siblings, a niece, many cousins, and his father (who recently passed away from Covid, unfortunately before Pete was able to meet him). Throughout many long, beautiful video calls with several family members, Pete has begun learning more about himself, seeing his features in his birth family, and planning a trip to meet them in person. His birth mother expressed that her soul has found peace now, and she is so proud of the man he has become in his career in financial fraud detection and passion areas of making music and health and fitness.
The next step is a coordinated trip via the Connecting Roots agency (https://connecting-roots.com) for Pete and other adoptees to meet their birth families while participating in documented interviews and news stories to spread awareness and make connections for more Chilean adoptees around the world.
Any help through donation and/or sharing this fundraiser will support things like plane tickets, an expedited passport, and other incidentals during his trip to meet his birth family, while he also shares his story to bring awareness to this decades long mystery for over 20,000 Chilean children and families. Any funds raised above his needs will be donated to Connecting Roots in order to help other Chilean adoptees be matched with and meet their birth families.
To learn more about this scandal and humanitarian crisis, I’ve included links below.
•••
•••
•••
Organizer
Kelly Simmons
Organizer
Centereach, NY