Healed scars and an emotional past

By ASHLEE KIVELL

Staff Writer

A woman walks toward me with a distinctive limp and greets me with a smile. She sits down beside me shuffling through old files and news articles. The long white scar on her left leg, contrasted by her dark skin, is a reminder of how lucky she is to be alive and walking. This woman has a story to tell. I sit patiently waiting for her to begin. Sita Ann Richmond Edwards is manager of a corporate chain store in Welland, Ont. She is a mother of two and a graduate of what was once the Visual Arts and Creative Design program at Niagara College. Before her successes she was the product of a war-torn country: a young orphan in dire need of medical treatment.

Sita was born in the late 1960s in Bangladesh during the Independence War in Pakistan. West Pakistani soldiers invaded her village of Mankun, near the country’s capital of Dhaka, in 1971. About 130 people were killed in her village that day including her mother and father.

Sita pulls out a letter from a manila envelope and scans its contents. Tears form in her eyes as the words on the page reveal her past.

The letter, sent to her on Sept. 5, 1994, is from a man she lovingly refers to as Father Homerich, who was holding Sita when her mother was shot and killed.

“The jackals ate her but did not touch you,” she begins, not looking up from the paper clutched in her hands. “You were found alive by a Pakistani officer and put in Mymensingh Medical Hospital. They gave you to me and I took you to the mission. At the time you were three but wouldn’t speak for about six months.”

She pauses before continuing, mulling over the words.

“I gave you to the missionaries of charity [Mother Theresa’s] because you had been shot through the knees and bayoneted.”

Sita crinkles her face at the facts, not remembering the extent of the injuries herself.

After finishing the letter Sita hands me a report that recounts the terrible conditions of the orphanages of Bangladesh in 1974. The booklet, named The India Project, was produced by the

, an organization that aided in finding homes for hard to place children from Third World countries. Founder

, the report author, was one of the many people who assisted in Sita’s placement with a family in Canada.

I sit down and flip through the yellowed pages of the report, scanning a couple of the chapters till I find the one I am looking for. In this chapter Ferrie discusses her trip to the Baby Home of the Sallimulla Orphanage at Azimpur in Bangladesh.

“The place was filthy, the children were filthy and the stench was familiar,” I begin to read, half out loud and half to myself. “The children had swollen bellies and withered limbs that I remembered so well from my previous visits. Their heads had been shaved in an effort to control the lice, but their scalp was covered with thick layers of dirt and grayish eggs of the next generation of lice, the whites of their eyes were coloured by the brown spots symptomatic of protein deficiency and their arms and legs were covered with scabies and the scars of the scabies they had scratched.”

That night I dream of bugs and suffering children.

The next day, at her apartment, Sita shows me her gums, permanently blackened from malnutrition. My eyes linger on the scar on her left leg and I sheepishly ask her about it. “My leg had stopped growing because an infection had set in. The orphanage could not do anything for it,” she explains. “I was in a leg brace when I came over [to Canada].”

Because of her condition, Sita was taken from the orphanage and sent to live with two doctors who could better care for her. One of those men was Dr. Ray Richmond, a physiotherapist with whom she shares part of her adopted name.

Dr. Richmond had thought about adopting Sita himself but was too elderly to take on such a venture. This proved to be true when he fell ill a short time later and died from bone cancer. Being her sole guardian, Sita had to travel with Dr. Richmond’s body to America. His son-in-law accompanied her on the journey. Meeting her in New York was her new father, Dr. John Mayer, a philosophy professor at Brock University in St. Catharines.

Dr. Mayer and his wife Elizabeth along with the Juan-Yin Foundation had fought long and hard to get her into the country. Dr. Mayer had waited at the airport many times in hopes that each new flight carrying orphans would contain his new daughter.

“Before I came to Canada, I didn’t have a birth certificate, didn’t have any records, and they didn’t know where I came from,” explains Sita.

Though records state that she was three when she came to live with the Mayer family, it is believed she was actually five.

“Legally I’m two years older than I really am,” she admits.

Sita had made it safely to Canada, yet her journey was not over. Soon after she settled in her new home in Niagara-on-the-Lake and became acquainted with her three new siblings, her leg became a serious concern. Hastily her parents took her to a doctor to see what could be done. The first option they were offered involved the removal of her leg. The second option was to try a new and experimental procedure involving the extensive lengthening of her stunted leg.

“As I still have my leg you can see what option they went with,” Sita jokes.

Even after these many years, Sita can still recall spending a significant amount of her childhood in and out of the hospital. Though she is able to walk with little trouble, she suffers from a noticeable limp and swelling in her left leg.

The 1970s bore a different view on interracial adoption. The Mayer family received their fair share of hate mail and odd looks from their neighbours when they introduced her to the community, says Sita. At the time even government officials were tying up adoptions using prejudice in place of policy. Now, international adoptions are quite common and an accepted practice. Under Amendment C-14, implemented in late 2007, children adopted abroad by Canadian citizens no longer have to wait for permanent residency to acquire citizenship.

Reliving her childhood, Sita sits in a sea of scattered old photographs, laughing every now and then at old clothing and out-of-style hair dos. She stops at a stack of pictures of a family she has never met. The eyes of her biological brother, sister-in-law, niece, nephew and an assortment of other relatives stare out from the glossy paper. Contact with her biological family began in the mid 1990s after learning of their existence from the foundation. I read the back of a photo and see the name of her brother, Anser Ali. Next to that is the name Hafaza Helena, Sita’s birth name. She whispers the name to herself before setting down the photo. I scan the rest of photos scattered about and notice a pattern. Sita is smiling and playing in many of the photos taken with her Canadian family at her home in Niagara-on-the-Lake. It makes me think back to something I read at the end of Helke Ferrie’s India report:

“Nature has programmed each child with the need for a mother and a father, regardless of whether that child has experienced parents yet. This archetypal need is as basic and as specific as hunger or thirst: no child, even if he has been raised in an orphanage from birth, ever has to be taught to recognize these two strangers as mommy and daddy.”

Now, Sita has her own family. Her two tall teenage boys wrestle and listen to hip-hop music as we finish our conversation in the living room. Sita is visited by an on-going flow of friends throughout the evening and I know that her life is not lacking. She smiles and laughs with me and I see no pain or questioning in her eyes as she hands me the pictures of her family in Bangladesh.

Though her journey has been a long and bumpy one, Sita has been given the best gift anyone could grant her. Matsuo Basho, the famous Japanese poet, wrote it best with his words: “Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”