Indonesia-born twins reunited after 29 years
Twins born in Indonesia and put up separately for adoption, have been reunited after finding each other on Facebook, living just 40 km apart in southern Sweden, three decades later.
Non-identical twins Emilie Falk and Lin Backman — strangers until last year — were separated nearly 29 years ago. According to a DNA test the pair had done two months after reuniting in January last year, there is a 99.98 per cent chance of them being sisters.
A complex string of events led up to that revelation. Both were adopted from an orphanage in Semarang in northern Indonesia by Swedish couples, but there was no mention in either of their documents of the fact that they had a twin.
When Backman’s parents left the orphanage with her all those years ago, the taxi driver had turned around and asked them: “What about the other one, the sister?” and they jotted the girls’ Indonesian names down on a piece of paper.
The name helped Backman’s parents track down the Falks back in Sweden, and the two families got together a few times when the girls were babies to compare notes.
“They went through the adoption papers, but they didn’t think we were very similar and there was a lot in the papers that didn’t add up... And there were no DNA tests back then,” Falk said. Among the discrepancies were different names for the girls’ fathers. And although the records showed they had the same mother, the families eventually decided that this too was an error.
The two couples in the end wrote off the idea and eventually lost touch.
