Tamuna Museridze took a deep breath and made the phone call she had been dreaming of ever since she found out she could be adopted.
She was calling a woman she thought was her own mother. She knew it might not lead to meeting the fairy, but she didn’t expect the response to be cold and angry.
“She started screaming, screaming – they say she didn’t give birth to a child. She wanted nothing to do with me,” Tamuna recalls, explaining that she was more surprised than upset by the response.
“I was prepared for anything, but her reaction was beyond anything I could have imagined.”
Tamuna wasn’t ready to leave yet. She wanted to know the circumstances of her adoption, and there was something else that only her mother could give her – her father’s name.
The search for Tamuna began in 2016, after the woman who raised her died. While cleaning out her house, Tamuna found a birth certificate with her name on it, but with the wrong date of birth, and began to suspect that she was adopted. After some research, she created a Facebook group called “Vedeb or I’m Looking” in hopes of finding her parents.
Instead, she uncovered a baby-trafficking scandal in Georgia that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people. For decades, parents were lied to and told their newborn babies had died – then the babies were sold.
Tamuna is a journalist and her work has reunited hundreds of families, but – until now – she could not solve the mystery of her own origins and wondered if she too had been stolen as a child.
“I was a journalist in this story, but it was also a personal mission for me,” she says.
