Susi is an educated, bilingual Guatemalan hired by adoptive parents who wish to locate their Guatemalan children's birth mothers.... Occasionally she will set up meetings between the two families. But most often she'll travel throughout Guatemala, often deep into the countryside, to knock on the door of a woman who hasn't received news of a child she placed for adoption years before.

This interview caught my eye. It is an interview between a Guatemalean searcher and an adoptive parent. The searcher says that she has conducted 193 searches and of those, 160 of them have been successful.

One point that was mentioned by the searcher is that she believes that it helps a birth mother to heal to be found and gain some information about her child. I certainly agree with that conclusion. The searcher in this interview sounded very insightful, undoubtedly from her experiences in meeting and dealing with many birth mothers.

She discusses the machismo factor in the birth mothers' history, and also that religion plays a big part in the total picture as well. Other factors mentioned are no sex education and no knowledge that a woman can have a sexual relationship without a child being born from it.

In this interview, the searcher also emphasizes that because of their love for their children, the adoptive parents that she has met know how important a birth mother connection might be for their child. To have their questions answered, she says is important. She stresses that having a connection with the birth family gives the child "a full picture of who they are."

The adoptive mom interviewer says that she has seen some birth mothers who show no visible emotion at all upon seeing the child that they relinquished and asks the searcher her opinion as to why that is the case. The searcher says the women that she finds have not relinquished recently that she meets. She believes that women who show no emotion have accepted their fate. The situation for birth mothers in Guatemala sounds extremely difficult for a variety of reasons which are discussed in this interview.