OFFSHORE

There’s an entire generation of Marshallese adoptees like London Lewis asking questions about who they are and where they come from. And there are plenty of parents searching for the children they gave up, too.

These reunions aren’t always easy. Many families have been separated for years by not only distance, but also language and culture. Finding their way back to each other is a complicated journey that can lead to places no one expects.

But right now, our biggest challenge with London’s family is helping a reunion happen at all.

London Lewis had to get back to work in Florida, so we’re continuing the search on his behalf — journeying to the Marshall Islands to where his story began, to try and find his birth father and his siblings. And get a sense of why women are still being recruited to leave the Marshall Islands and place their children with American families. It’s a search that will lead to dead ends, heartbreak, and completely unexpected moments of serendipity.

We started reporting for this season of Offshore last June, but we’re still chasing down leads and new developments. It’s been a busy few weeks for us. Which means we’re going to be publishing Episode 6 on Monday, May 18. In the meantime, we wanted to share a poem with you by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner. She’s from the Marshall Islands, and you’ll be hearing more from her in upcoming episodes.

London Lewis’ biggest worry when he arrived in Springdale was how he would be received. Would other Marshallese people recognize him? Accept him?

It didn’t take long for him to form instant connections with people who want him to know that he not only belongs in the Marshallese community but he is needed in the Marshallese community.

But acceptance and belonging are not the same thing. London is just at the beginning of a long and complicated journey to figure out where he fits into the Marshallese diaspora.

And Springdale is about to get him a lot closer to solving one of the biggest questions about his past.

In Springdale, London Lewis begins to experience Marshallese culture for the first time. He’s going to meet people he’s only read about in World War II textbooks. Hear a language he’s never heard except for on YouTube. Get a little closer to finding his birth family.

But we’re not just in Springdale for London. We’re also here to try and find out exactly what’s happening with Marshallese adoptions today. To speak with private adoption lawyers, adoptive families, and Marshallese birth mothers about the adoption process.

Adoptions are big business. As international adoptions have dropped off, there are still hundreds of thousands of adoptive parents vying for an increasingly small pool of healthy babies. Many of them are turning to this small community in Arkansas where private adoption lawyers and their Marshallese liaisons – or fixers – are household names for quickly matching them with Marshallese birth mothers.

More migrants from the Marshall Islands now live in Springdale, Arkansas, than any other place in the world. It’s a surprising choice for them, moving en masse to a small Midwest town that is about as different from their island homeland as you can get. London Lewis was born in the Marshall Islands, but he doesn’t have the resources to make that trip any time soon. So if he’s going to have a chance of finding someone who knows his family, he has to start here.

In 1986, as part of a treaty between the U.S.and three Micronesian nations, Marshallese were given the right to travel to this country with little if any immigration restrictions. But nobody anticipated the wave of migration that would follow. Or that the treaty would contribute to an adoption explosion from the islands.

Now, the migration has taken root in this quiet corner of Arkansas — where local judges say as many as nine out of 10 adoptions are of Marshallese children.

Susette Lewis was excited when she arrived in Honolulu in 1992. And like most new moms, nervous. Uncertain of what to expect. She didn’t know that picking up her adopted son would be an alarming experience.

Her son, London, says he had a happy childhood, growing up in a big house in a town just past the Everglades. But he’s spent a lot of time searching for a connection to a culture thousands of miles from where he was raised.

And while he did a lot of research in college on American military history in the Marshall Islands, he wants a sense of what’s missing from Western textbooks.

International adoptions were a rarity in the Marshall Islands until the mid-’90s. Then came an adoption boom of such intensity that the remote island nation suddenly had one of the highest per-capita adoption rates in the world. In just a few years, hundreds of children were adopted from the far-flung atolls — so many that it seemed like an entire generation was disappearing.

Now, two decades later, some of these children are beginning to search for answers about who they are and where they come from. Some, like 25-year-old London Lewis, have never known a single person from their native country. Adopted as an infant from the Marshall Islands, London’s journey home would begin with a Facebook post.

A young man on a quest to find his birth family. An adoption market that rocked an island nation. A culture in danger of disappearing — and the desperate fight to save it. Join Offshore for an unforgettable eight-episode season this spring. www.offshorepodcast.org

Hawaii’s false nuclear alarm scare sends Offshore reporters on a trip back in time to 1962, when Hawaii had a very different kind of brush with nuclear weapons. Just a few months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Hawaii witnessed a nuclear explosion so massive that darkness briefly turned to daylight. Instead of inspiring fear, the detonation sparked celebrations.