Imagine what that moment would be like when a mother comes to know after 42 years that a piece of her liver is alive. It will not be easy for the son to describe this moment of meeting in words. A similar miracle has happened in the South American country Chile. When a young man named Jimmy Lippert Thiden said these words in Spanish to his estranged mother, Maria Angelica Gonzalez, it was as if time had stopped. Both of them hugged each other and started crying. Maria was clutching a piece of her liver to her chest at her home in Valdivia, Chile.
With tears flowing from his eyes, Jimmy said to his mother, ‘I love you very much.’ There was no limit to Maria’s happiness after holding her son to her chest after so many years. She says that the happiness was so much that my breathing stopped. I want to cover this long gap in a moment. I want to give my son the love he has deserved over the years. The story is 42 years old, when Maria gave birth to a child in the hospital. While she was looking at the child in her arms, the hospital staff took the child away.
Later he was informed that his son had died, but this was not true, because the child had been stolen by the hospital staff. In fact, thousands of children were snatched from Chilean families in the 1970s and 1980s.
This is how the son’s journey to find his mother began
Jimmy’s journey to find his biological family began in April this year. It began when she began reading stories of Chilean-born adoptees who were reunited with their biological parents with the help of the Chilean non-profit organization Nos Buscamos (We Search). Over the past nine years, Nos Buscamos has reunited more than 450 “lost people.” The organization discovered that Jimmy’s mother had given birth prematurely in a hospital in Chile’s capital, Santiago, and Jimmy was taken from her and placed in an incubator. Angelica was asked to leave the hospital, but when she returned she was told that her child had died.
DNA test confirmed, reunion happened again
The organization ‘Nos Buscamos’ has been working for the past two years with the genealogy platform ‘MyHeritage’, which provides free home DNA testing kits for Chilean adoptees and suspected victims of child trafficking in Chile . Jimmy’s DNA test confirmed that he was 100% Chilean and matched a relative of his who used the ‘MyHeritage’ platform. After this, his quest to reunite with his mother, who was separated 42 years ago, was completed.
