Amy and Ano are identical twins, but until 2021 they were unaware of each other’s existence. The sisters were separated at birth and adopted by different families as part of an expansive illegal adoption racket in Georgia. They were born in Kirtskhi maternity hospital in 2002. Years ago, when Amy was 12, she was watching her favourite TV program, Georgia’s Got Talent, when she saw a girl identical to her performing on the show.
Everyone noticed the resemblance but her family brushed it off. Recalling this moment Amy told BBC, “My mother said everyone has a doppelganger.” Seven years later, in November 2021, Amy posted a video of herself getting her eyebrow pierced on TikTok. Two hundred miles away in Tbilisi, another 19-year-old-year-old girl named Ano saw this and thought, “Cool, she looks like me”.
Ano tried to find Amy by sharing this video in university groups and luckily the message reached Amy. Amy instantly knew Ano was the girl she had seen on the TV. They decided to meet. Recalling their first face-to-face meeting, Amy said, “It was like looking in a mirror, the exact same face, exact same voice. I am her and she is me.” As they talked, they both realised they had too many similarities. They were both born in the same maternity hospital and they had the same genetic disease, a bone disorder called dysplasia. However, the date on their birth certificate was weeks apart.
They eventually confronted their family who admitted they had been adopted. However, no one knew anything about their biological family or the fact that they were born twins. Their families explained that at the time they did not realise that the adoption could have been illegal even as they paid an undisclosed hefty sum for adoption.
Amy soon found a Facebook group that was dedicated to reuniting Georgian families that were victims of illegal adoptions. She found another woman named ‘Aza’ from Germany, who told Amy that “her mother had given birth to twin girls in Kirtskhi Maternity Hospital in 2002 and that despite being told they had died, she now had some doubts.”
Amy, Ano, and Aza took DNA tests and found out that they were sisters. Eventually, the twins travelled to Germany to meet their mother who was living with their sister Aza. Their mother explained that after the difficult birth, she was in a coma, and when she woke up the hospital staff told her that her twins died.
This meeting was comforting for all of them. Ano told BBC, “I always felt like there was something or someone missing in my life. I used to dream about a little girl in black who would follow me around and ask me about my day. That feeling disappeared when I found Amy.”
The Facebook group that Amy and Ano used to trace their biological family has more than 2,30,000 members. It was started by journalist Tamuna Museridze in 2021 after she discovered that she too was illegally adopted.
Tamuna Museridze’s reporting has exposed a baby trafficking scandal that was active in Georgia in the 1950s and early 2000s. BBC reported that in 2005, the Georgia government amended its adoption legislation and strengthened anti-trafficking laws to curb illegal adoptions.
Comments
0 comment