Two sisters, Jamina and Amina, were about to be given up for adoption. “But Amina would not stop crying. So her name was stricken off the document, leaving just my name – Jamina – on the form,” Esther says, referring to herself by her middle – and birth – name.
Thirty-eight years after her adoption, Esther Jamina Jording, a Bangladesh-born woman who was adopted by an American couple as an infant, is back in Bangladesh for a reunion with her long-lost birth family.
Her story has captured the imagination of Bangladesh, the United States and the Facebookverse. For days social media accounts of her journey from the Pacific Northwest to the edge of the Sundarbans have been told and retold, shared and liked.
Not surprisingly, inaccuracies have crept into the reports picked up by the media. I have been invited to hear a first-hand account of her journey and help set the record straight.
In a beautifully appointed penthouse flat awash with sunlight in Dhaka’s Banani neighbourhood, I sit with Esther and her friends Naheed and Dan Brown, without whose help she might never have tracked down her family. The flat belongs to Naheed’s brother Reza Amin and his wife Sonia, and serves as base camp for the final leg of Esther’s odyssey.
Naheed’s sister Naureen Saira, who lives in Arizona, can be credited with catalysing, in earnest, Esther’s hunt for her kin. Their cousin, Sharif Ahmed Nipu, senior regional sales manager of the Coca-Cola depot in Khulna, where Esther’s birth family are from, organised the door-to-door search for a family that fit the description.
Long before she had found her birth family, Esther had already acquired a family in Bangladesh that she could call her own. “Family doesn’t always mean you have to be blood related – I’ve always known that.”
Esther’s blog reads: “I was only a week old when my father, Mohon Gazi, placed me in an orphanage in Khulna.”
“My mother was out working in the brick fields when I was adopted,” she tells me.
Visiting Bangladesh in the sweltering heat of July, Esther is aware of how tough a working class life here can be.
She believes she was put up for adoption as a chance to escape the poverty of the rural Bangladesh of the late ’70s.
“Was I sold for Tk500? I don’t know. I know that money was exchanged during the adoption process. I might have been, but we’re not sure because he [her father] is not alive,” Esther says. “I think he was trying to give us a better life.”
Dan’s eyes glisten with emotion as he describes how Esther’s mother catches fish for the table and for sale by hauling a dragnet through the shallows of a river.
It is this gruelling work that occasioned Esther’s tearful farewell remark, picked up by Bangladesh’s news media: “No more fishing.”
“She won’t have to do that kind of work ever again,” Esther tells me.
Her oldest sibling and only brother, Sattar, drives a rickshaw van. Her sisters Monowara, Anowara and Amina work at a betel nut sorting and packing company.
Whatever the intentions, the adoption proved a source of conflict for the family.
“My mother, distraught at the fact that he took me from her, became so angry with him that he left the family and fled. My father was gone for about four years. When he returned, he suffered from an infection which eventually took his life,” Esther writes in her blog.
Esther was adopted by the AG Mission orphanage, where missionaries Mary and Pate signed her adoption papers and helped process her transfer to Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada. At ten-and-a-half months of age, a couple from Portland, Oregon, in the United States, drove up to Canada and adopted Jamina. They named her Esther.
“I grew up in a white community, and was raised a Christian.”
“My [adoptive] mother always told me I was from Bangladesh. But I was told there was no information about my parents.”
But a chance Twitter exchange leading to a friendship with Naureen in 2012, empowered Esther to feel that she might yet track down her birth family in Bangladesh.
Her adoption papers – hiding in plain sight inside a Manila envelope tucked away inside her baby book – were soon found. Inside the envelope she found her certificate of abandonment, on which, in faded letters, were written the names of her mother and her village.
Naureen enlisted the support of her older sister Naheed and brother-in-law Dan who live near Esther, in Portland. They were able to make out that Esther’s mother’s name was Nurjahan Khatun.
“Next we had to decipher the name of the village but this was difficult because the writing was faint,” Esther says.
Naheed says: “I was able to figure out a few letters and began googling various letter combinations hoping to find a match.”
Dan adds: “We finally felt that she was from Gunari village in Dakop Thana. This is such a remote village that I was only able to find it on a single map.”
The results of this investigative googling were passed on to Reza and Nipu, both in Bangladesh. An employee at the Coca-Cola depot, Akhtaruzzaman Milu, said he knew a schoolteacher named Amit Babu who taught in Gunari village.
“Amit was asked to search for a family that had given up a child for adoption in the late seventies,” Esther says.
But he was kept in the dark about Esther’s identity and circumstances as a precaution against attracting impostors. Amit went door-to-door on his motorcycle until he got word of a family that fit the bill.
On Esther’s 36th birthday, June 24, 2013, Nurjahan Khatun was found.
She told Nipu that her daughter had been given up for adoption over 30 years ago. Nipu sent pictures of Nurjahan and her other daughters to the United States.
“One look at her mother and we felt we had a lock,” Naheed says.
The resemblance between Esther and Nurjahan was striking – but ties of blood still had not been proven. Esther felt a DNA test was the way to go, and a friend, Lamia Karim, ferried the test kit from the US during a trip to Dhaka.
The results of the DNA test were not due until the first week of January 2014.
On Christmas Eve 2013, Esther and Nurjahan spoke for the first time ever on Skype and Facetime with Naheed translating as she held her smartphone up to her laptop screen.
“I cried,” Esther says.
“Don’t cry. You have a home here,” she recalls Nurjahan saying to her.
Emotionally, having the conversation was a risky thing to do – Esther still was not certain whether Nurjahan was her mother.
“What if it wasn’t a match? Even if it wasn’t a match, I’d call her my mother.”
She needn’t have worried – the results showed a 99.999% match.
On June 24, 2015, her 38th birthday – and two years to the day after her mother had been located – Esther was on a flight en route to Dhaka.
Last week in Khulna, after 38 years, mother and daughter finally met face to face. “The language barrier did not matter. I felt instantly connected to my mother and sisters. You can communicate if you have to and want to.”
She smiles: “My mother is just like me, she can’t sit still.”
Genuinely overwhelmed by the warmth of the welcome she received, she says: “This is the most non-judgemental place I have ever been to.”
Esther hopes to bring her mother and sister Amina on a visit to the United States soon.
She is blessed to have family yearning for her wherever she goes. Back in Vancouver, Washington, her sons Jackson, 7, Lincoln, 6, and Taft, 7 months – The Presidents – are impatient for her to get home.
She says Lance, her husband, has written to her, saying: “I miss you more than anything in the world.”
Esther, mildly amused, tells me: “I took a screenshot of that.”