TORONTO — In 2007, Adrienne Rosen set off to Guatemala in search of her adopted daughter Alana’s birth mother.

Adrienne Rosen,  left  is seen with  Marcelina Cardona,  Rosen’s  adopted daughter’s birth mother, outside the elementary school  in La Union, a small town in northern  Guatemala.

Not only did she find the mother, but she founded a non-profit organization to benefit La Union, the birth mother’s village, where the poverty is so extreme most children can’t afford to go to school.

The story begins well before 2007. Rosen notes that her daughter had an “unremarkable Jewish upbringing.” She attended the Paul Penna Downtown Jewish Day School, the Toronto Heschel School and Camp Gesher, but “she had always felt different from people in her family and the greater Jewish community.”

That point was brought home to her when she was at camp one summer and another camper told her she couldn’t be Jewish because she was “brown,” Rosen recalls.

“The camp director, a Yemenite Jew, was brown himself. He used this as a time to teach kids at camp about racism and about Jewish history and about how many different places Jewish people come from.”

In her early teens, her adoptive daughter went through a difficult emotional period typical of many adolescent girls, but her angst was exacerbated by issues related to her adoption, explains Rosen. These children frequently confront issues of “loss and abandonment.

“I had a hunch that my daughter needed to meet her birth mother and ask her the essential question in every adopted child’s life: ‘Why did my mother give me away?’”

Rosen went to Guatemala with Tim Wilson, a neighbour who had spent some time there. They had the mother’s name, her city of origin and her national identity number. “My daughter asked for nothing, but a picture of her biological mother,” remembers Rosen. “She thought I was crazy to make the trip.”

Their search began with a four-hour drive north near the Mexican border.

Five hours later, they located the family. “When I knocked on the door, the mother answered, but she said it was a case of mistaken identity.”

The Toronto duo returned to the capital to compile a paper trail. They got a birth certificate listing the identity number of Marcelina Cardona, the mother, as well as a copy of a ledger page with her picture.

“We went back to La Union armed with the truth,” says Rosen. “This time I kept a video camera on my hip running.

“I was damned if I would go through all of this and not have a picture.”

On the second visit, they were greeted by a woman of about 30. “Tim said, ‘Oh look! Here comes your daughter’s sister’… She looked exactly like my daughter.”

Noting the “extreme poverty,” Rosen says she told this woman they meant no harm. “I said if you’re related to my daughter then I’m related to you. I am in a position to help you.”

Two hours later, they were sitting in a courtyard with the birth mother.

“She told us she was 45 when she had my daughter. She already had 10 children and couldn’t feed them. Her husband doesn’t get much work, so she takes in laundry.”

She gave birth to twin daughters, but she only brought one home, recounts Rosen. “My daughter weighed only three pounds and would have died, so her mother gave her up for adoption.

“No one in the family knew about her. When I appeared, I was the nightmare from hell.”

Her daughter’s siblings ranged in age from 16 to 34, and all, except the family’s only son, were illiterate because the family couldn’t afford the $75 annual tuition fee to send them to school.

“I was horrified to think that these people couldn’t read or write.”

Rosen was able to put her daughter’s nieces and nephews in school and pay a private teacher to tutor the adults. She promised the principal she would find the funds to help educate other children in the village of 4,000.

Rosen’s adoptive daughter met her biological mother about three months after her adoptive mother found her.

She went back for the wedding of one of her sisters, but she’s not interested in more visits to her country of birth for now, Rosen says.

“She said, ‘Now I know where I’m from, but it’s not who I am.’

“I have always believed that she had to know her history to move forward with her life. If we don’t know where we’re from, we don’t know where we’re going.”