In The Heart of Belonging: An Adoptee’s Quest for His Origins, author Emil Daugaard brings together his lifelong experience of growing up, living and developing in the borderland between the Western and Arabic worlds. The author shares his reflections on international adoptions as a phenomenon charged with moral considerations, inviting the reader to take part in his inner journey between hope and despair on the long road to claiming the right to understand his own origins.

The Heart of Belonging: An Adoptee’s Quest for His Origins provides an opportunity to experience a significant portion of the childhood, challenges and opportunities an adoptee encounters in the lifelong effort of balancing a foreign exterior with an inner life that’s quite familiar to the people around him. Daugaard’s work offers useful practical advice and guidance to people who are already or are considering becoming adoptive parents. It speaks directly to people who are wrestling with an incomplete family history, or have not discovered their innermost selves, or are seeking the courage to reach out to the unknown and frightening.

Co-author Dr. Talal Khodari guides readers through the sometimes frightening reality behind what goes under the guise of international adoption, a world of widespread corruption and organized trafficking in children in an adoption system characterized by opacity and inhuman greed. Together, the authors share their thoughts on the possible reasons for both the voluntary giving-up of children and the illegal kidnapping of children in a society torn by war. They show how the invisible scars left by an incomplete adoption process can result in a complicated, lifelong process of healing for the child.

Ultimately, The Heart of Belonging: An Adoptee’s Quest for His Origins also shares with readers the author’s more uplifting story about how being different can be a way of being unique, about bonds of friendship across boundaries, about fears overcome, and about his encounter with people who gave him an indescribably familiar sense of cultural belonging.