TV: Emotional journey to children's past

A group of New Zealanders took their adopted, Romanian-born children back to their native land this year. TERI FITSELL talks to one of them.

Ten years ago, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown and the outside world saw for the first time the dreadful results of his tyrannical rule. Few will have been unmoved by those pictures of thousands of babies abandoned in ill-equipped, overcrowded orphanages.

Between 1990 and 1991, 156 Romanian children were adopted by New Zealand families. In March this year, six of those families returned with their adopted children to Romania, on a pilgrimage to reunite them with their birth families.

As tonight's Inside New Zealand documentary Return to Romania (TV3, 8.30) shows, it was a courageous journey and put some of the families - both the New Zealand and the Romanian sides - through an emotional wringer. Don't be put off by the word emotional, the programme doesn't resort to any cheap tugging at heartstrings. It doesn't have to.

In the capable hands of director Megan Jones and associate producer Rachel Stace (veteran of other adoption documentaries and a book, Love Has No Boundaries), it's real television done for all the right reasons.

It concentrates on three of the six families: the Sagemans who adopted Stefan (now 10) and Florina (8); the Aislabies with Josh (9); and Jo and Ken Oborn who adopted Anna (8).

The New Zealand families met in 1990 after returning from Romania with the babies. They've become solid friends and the children regard each other as cousins.

The parents have striven to give their adopted children a strong sense of their original cultural identity. And all of them, despite the evident traumas of the return to Romania, feel strongly that making the journey was the right thing to do.

Speaking in Auckland, Jo Oborn explained: "Information in recent years clearly indicates that children adopted from different countries do benefit from, and do need to know, their identities. We also felt that if Anna sees Romania, and what it is, she'll understand why she was adopted. That could be of great benefit, maybe not now, but when she's a teenager and more questioning."

The first half of the documentary looks at the difficulties each couple faced when they originally went to Romania. It features their own video footage, showing bare, car-less streets strewn with rubbish, houses that wouldn't pass for sheds here, and those heartbreaking orphanages.

The second half reveals that not much has changed. Said Jo Oborn: "On the face of it there were some differences, like advertising hoardings where before there were none. And for tourists there's more. But for the ordinary people it's probably worse."

The Oborns' experience when they meet Anna's alcoholic birth father is particularly grim, though the reunion with her birth mother and siblings is far happier.

Josh's journey seems the least traumatic, with his mother Natasha having invited the whole village to come and celebrate his return - which they do with gusto. Josh stands up supremely well to being hugged and kissed by an alarming number of elderly female relatives.

Stefan's family find answers to their questions about his origins The answers are not easy, though, and the documentary throws up a lot more questions. One wonders, for instance, what effect the visit had on the Romanian siblings who surely must have compared their own poverty-stricken existence to the apparent untold wealth of their New Zealand relatives. And it's debatable whether the Kiwis' readiness to help out with a few debts might have caused more problems than it solved.

But the positives are many, one of the main ones being the children's reactions to the desolation of the orphanages.

Said Jo Oborn: "Anna wanted to bring back one of the babies. Given the conditions, it's only natural. You feel like just picking them up and taking them away from there. Anna told me, 'When I'm a grown-up I'm going to come back and get one.' It will be nice if all the children keep that attitude and don't forget.

"As [my husband] Ken says: 'Your kids are only on loan to you, anyway. If any of them grow up and enter a field where they could go back and do some good in their original country, that would be great.'

"I certainly won't be pulling any apron strings to stop Anna."