TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - A woman wrapped in a coat stood before Joel Heiner with tears welling in her eyes in July 2025. In the cool winter air of Brisbane, Australia, Heiner embraced her tightly. She was Meite, his biological mother.
Meite repeatedly asked Heiner for forgiveness. Heiner rested his head on her shoulder as they both broke into tears. It was the first time Heiner had met his mother after spending years searching for his family. “My mother apologized and said that giving me up had been the greatest trauma of her life,” Heiner told Tempo in March 2026.
Meite gave birth to Heiner in Surabaya, East Java, at a time when her family was struggling financially. She had separated from Heiner’s biological father, and the difficult circumstances led her to place her three-month-old son in an orphanage in the East Java city. The orphanage has since disappeared without a trace. It turned out that the institution facilitated adoptions of Indonesian children by families from several countries.
Through what appeared to be a legal process, Heiner was adopted by a family from Woerden, Utrecht, in the Netherlands. His adoptive family later took him to live in both the Netherlands and the United States because his adoptive father was an evangelist who traveled internationally for missionary work.
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