Nostalgic return to Romania

It's been 18 years since Kristina Larsen has been to her homeland of Romania, and she's understandably both excited and nervous about what it will be like when she returns the first week of September.

Will she be overcome with emotion? Will she experience a wave of nostalgia? Will she feel an unspoken bond?

But there's one thing she knows for sure: She won't consciously recognize a single thing.

That's because she was 2 weeks old when she left.

Kristina was born in late 1990. It was not the most opportune time to enter the world in Romania. The country was overrun with orphans, a residue from the iron-fisted reign of Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator who ruled the country for a quarter of a century and imposed heavy fines on people for not having as many children as possible.

By the time Ceausescu was deposed in late 1989, Romania already had way more kids than it could care for, with more on the way.

In 1990, as Kristina was being carried by a birth mother she would never know, the American TV news program "20/20" focused on the plight of Romanian orphans.

Several Utah families saw the show, got on a plane and flew to Romania to see about adopting orphans. Among them was a woman named Ginger Hawks (Larsen at the time).

A strong believer in what she calls spiritual direction, and what others might call fate, Ginger found a local driver and asked to be taken to the orphanages.

"There were no agencies back then, no attorneys to work through," remembers Ginger. "We'd go straight to these orphanages and beg to see the kids."

Later, there would be agencies and attorneys and plenty of red tape, and eventually adoptions by Americans would be banned.

But by then, Ginger was back in Utah with Kristina and Lisa, the two girls "I was led to."

The infant girls grew up as American as Shirley Temple. They didn't know they'd been born somewhere else until they were learning their times tables and singing Mariah Carey lyrics.

Kristina says she knows four words of Romanian — runa, (hi), pa (bye) cheefatch (what's up) and da (yes).

"That's it. That's all I know," she smiles.

She confesses that she never felt a desire to see the land of her birth. "I don't know why, I just didn't," she says.

Maybe it's because she was so busy growing up. She was no slacker in school. Mom Ginger calls her "a model student." Two months ago Kristina graduated with honors from Hurricane High School, where she belonged to every kind of social club she could fit in around her studies.

"People are my passion," she says with all the enthusiasm an 18-year-old can muster.

But recently she was in California where several of her Romanian cousins, all of whom left the country as babies in 1990-1991, spoke of returning this fall on a humanitarian mission.