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Lost mum found
after 25 years
76-year-old woman reunited with
her kin after a life of begging and poverty.
True life is often stranger than fiction. An elderly woman was
yesterday reunited with her family 25 years after taking a wrong
bus that led her into a life of poverty and confinement.
Jaeyaena Beuraheng, 76, was tearfully reunited with relatives
yesterday at Phitsanulok's Wang Thong social service centre.
Twenty-five years ago, Malay-speaking Narathiwat resident
Jaeyaena thought she was boarding a bus bound for Narathiwat
from Malaysia.
Not being able to read, write or speak Thai, she did not know
the bus was headed for Bangkok.
When she arrived in the capital, she tried to get back to the
South but compounded her crisis by taking a bus to Chiang Mai
instead.
There she spent the next five years begging.
She was arrested in 1987 and has been in the social service
centre since then.
Yesterday "overjoyed" relatives arrived in Phitsanulok after a
25-hour journey to take Jaeyaena home.
Her youngest son Mamu, 35, said through a translator that he was
10 when his mother disappeared after going to visit her husband
across the border.
Mamu and his seven brothers and sisters searched in vain for
years in Thailand and Malaysia until they were told Jaeyaena had
been run over by a train in Yala.
They continued to make merit for her every year.
Earlier this month, three students from Mamu's neighbourhood
training at the Phitsanulok social service centre - Nuriyanee
Waekeuji, 20, Sumaiya Sawaeko, 19, and Arsor Rormeudee, 19 - met
Jaeyaena. They photographed her with their mobile telephone and
sent the picture to Mamu.
"I was shocked and overjoyed when I saw the picture. It was
certainly my mother. I remembered her face, even though I've not
seen her for 25 years," Mamu said.
Staff at the centre had for years assumed Jaeyaena was Mon or
Shan. The three Narathiwat women were the only ones who had been
able to communicate with her.
It was only then that Jaeyaena's tragic story emerged, centre
manager Jintana Satjang said.
Manaschai Ananta
The Nation
PHITSANULOK
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