BIBI HASENAAR HAS HAD TWO LIVES. One began in November 1976, when she was about four, arriving in the Netherlands to meet her adoptive parents. “I remember it vividly. There’s a photo of us at the airport with other children arriving from Bangladesh – it was published in a Dutch paper.” Her older brother Babu was there, too.
Her other life appears only in fragments. She remembers being in a children’s home with another older brother and having her food stolen by older children. “It was not a nice place to be,” Hasenaar says. Her only memory of their mother is her long black hair. But of the flight out of Bangladesh, she remembers every detail. At her kitchen table in the village of Muiderberg, 30 minutes’ drive east of Amsterdam, sipping hot water and fresh ginger, the 51-year-old slowly recounts the long journey that changed her life.
The plane, which felt huge to Hasenaar, who was malnourished and small for her age, was empty save for the four or five children who were being escorted for adoption. Babu was holding a black and white picture of his new family but, Hasenaar says, “ No one explained anything to me; I didn’t know what was happening.” She remembers a constant feeling of shock, interrupted briefly by awe when the plane took off and she realised they were in the sky. The only adult she recognised was an English woman she had seen at the children’s home in Bangladesh, who was there to escort them to their new families. At one point, Hasenaar became hysterical. “They tied me to the seat with a rope because I could not be calmed. I wasn’t allowed to go to my brother in the rows ahead; I just felt so alone.”
At Schiphol airport, things got worse. The children were taken to await the arrival of their adoptive parents. “It was a big room, and I felt very cold,” Hasenaar says. “They wouldn’t let me go to my brother.” To her horror, she soon discovered why: Babu had been adopted by a different family. Hasenaar began to cry inconsolably.
After three days with her new family, she was still in a state of distress. “My new parents got in contact with the adoption agency and said: ‘It’s not possible for this girl to stay here – she is so sad and just wants to be with her brother. ’” The couple who had adopted Babu agreed to take her, too.
But Hasenaar says she felt unwanted, both by her second adopted family, who had only asked for one child, and by her birth mother, who she believed had given her up. Life in the Dutch village was completely alien. “I had to sleep when I wasn’t tired, eat when I wasn’t hungry,” she says. While Babu – who chose not to be interviewed for this article – adapted, Hasenaar says she has always been head-strong. “ You can do
