The following story is part of a series of stories narrated by youth deprived of family ties as part of the advocacy campaign activities for the “Empowering Care Leavers in Jordan” project.
My mother passed away when I was one year old and I lived in a care center until the age of 18.
My siblings and I were all shocked by what we faced when we left the care center. They sent us to our father’s house, a man we hadn’t really known. 
Doesn’t this care center care to ensure that the house’s conditions and my father’s health conditions were ok before sending us back? Weren’t we left in this care center because of a problem in the first place? Had they conducted the necessary checks to ensure the house was safe before sending us back?
I don’t have an answer. We were left alone to face this new reality. I sat for Tawjihi again and I passed. Thanks to Al-Aman Fund, I studied in university and challenged all of these circumstances to complete my studies. I also earned my master’s degree in media, supported by a person who believed in me at the time.
I owe this success to my own personal efforts and the support of some organizations working with care leavers. However, things were never easy, not even with these degrees. We do not have a national number, because my mother is Jordanian but my father is not.
Unlike other children in the care center, whose parents are unknown, we were not given national numbers because our parents were known. We hoped the decision to grant children of Jordanian mothers married to non-Jordanians a special card would make our daily life easier. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case.
After a long search in the few documents we could find, we went to the Civil Status Department. They told us that my mother’s number could not be found in any of their records, and so we came back empty-handed with no national number.
The only tax statement, which shows my mother’s national number, did not yield any result. Is there a more complicated story? Is there a solution?