Dual Citizenship for Transnational Adoptees

Kara Bos (Kang Misuk) is an #importedAsian from Korea to America, and is now a Dutchie—living in Amsterdam with her Dutch husband and two amazing children.

Kara is an adventure-seeker discovering the world one country at a time (more than 50 so far!), an entrepreneur running a drowning prevention program Children of the Water Amsterdam, and through her journey has become a resilient spokesperson for adoptees’ rights. She is determined to change the rhetoric of the more than 200,000 Korean adoptees searching for their identities and past; while also hoping to change the narrative of the definition of what adoption means to the average individual. Furthermore, she is a woman, wife, and mom, trying to do her best at all three of those while not sacrificing any of them.

Mary Cardaras is the Director of The Demos Center at The American College of Greece in Athens. She holds a PhD in Public and International Affairs, and is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. Mary is one of the so-called “lost children of Greece,” the first group of babies and children in history to be systematically exported from their country of origin. She has spoken about and has written numerous articles about Greek adoptees and is an advocate and activist for the human rights of all adoptees. She has written a novella called Ripped at the Root (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021), the story of a stolen baby from Greece, who was reunited with her birth parents and siblings after 42 years apart. She also edited a collection of essays by Greek born adoptees, her own included, entitled Voices of the Lost Children of Greece published in English by Anthem Press (2023) and in Greek by Potamos Publishers in Athens (2023).

Ben Fossen was adopted from Guatemala at four months old in 1990 to a family in the United States. He is an engineer, investor, and entrepreneur. He co-founded Adoptees with Guatemalan Roots, a global community of people adopted from Guatemala and currently serves as its Board Chairman. Ben has been back to Guatemala 30+ times, and reconnected with his birth family in 2015. He is very close with them and visits multiple times a year, and they have welcomed him as a member of the family. Ben was involved in lobbying the Guatemalan government and its President to get services for Guatemalan adoptees, where were approved and implemented in 2021.

Gonda Van Steen holds the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature in the Department of Classics at King’s College London. She is the author of many articles and five books: Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece; Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire; Theatre of the Condemned: Classical Tragedy on Greek Prison Islands; Stage of Emergency: Theater and Public Performance under the Greek Military Dictatorship of 1967-1974, and Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece (2019, in Greek: Ζητούνται παιδιά από την Ελλάδα: Υιοθεσίες στην Αμερική του Ψυχρού Πολέμου, 2021). She most recently edited and published The Battle for Bodies, Hearts and Minds in Postwar Greece: Social Worker Charles Schermerhorn in Thessaloniki, 1946-1951. With Mary Cardaras, she spearheads the campaign Nostos for Greek Adoptees.