After four decades, the unwavering belief in miracles of one mother and an unexpected gift bore fruit just in time for Mother’s Day.
Montrealer Martin Moya gave his wife Diana Angarita a birthday gift that would unknowingly change their lives forever.
“When something is for you, it’s for you. You know, because my husband wanted to give me that present,” Diana said.
Martin gave Diana a DNA test kit from a company called MyHeritage.
Diana doesn’t know her father, and her mom Carmen Angarita is an orphan who also doesn’t know her family.
The present was meant to find more about their origins. But she got more than that when she recently got the results.
“My husband was beside me and I told him, ‘Martin, I think that I found my sister,'” Diana said.
Diana grew up knowing her mom Carmen had given up her first-born daughter for adoption in Colombia.
Carmen had no means to care for the baby.
“I was so distraught when I left her that I was almost run over by a bus. I hadn’t had food all day nor a place to live,” Carmen said.
Since that day forty years ago, Carmen simultaneously carried a heavy weight in her soul and the unwavering belief that a miracle would take place.
“She was always telling me, ‘We are going to find Xiomara one day,’ but for me it was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, mami, that’s impossible.’ But yeah, she was right.”
Xiomara Schuuring, in the Netherlands, had also taken the same DNA test Diana did, with the same company and she, too, wanted to reconnect.
“I hope to see you very, very soon, together with my son,” Xiomara said in a video message she sent to her birth mother Carmen.
The wish Carmen held for more than four decades is one flight away from coming true.
“That she hugs me and I hug her and we’re happy together with my grandson,” Carmen said from her home in Bogota, Colombia.
The family is planning to meet in person this Christmas in Colombia, so Diana can show her sister her roots.
“It would be like the perfect Christmas, this is the real gift,” Diana said.