Jeddah, Aug 7: When Saudi freelance journalist Rawan Radwan set out to locate her childhood nanny, she never imagined that her search would become an international news story, warming hearts around the globe.
Three years ago, the 29-year-old Saudi woman and her sister, Hadeel, discovered a deeply touching personal letter written to their mother by a woman from the Philippines 22 years ago.
“The discovery of that letter sparked my curiosity to find this person,” said Radwan. “She was our nanny, and her full name was Marie Ning' Bernardo. Many of our happy childhood memories are associated with her.”
With time and distance working against her, Radwan was frustrated time and again in her quest to locate the long lost nanny.
“I wanted to know where life had taken her,” she told Arab News. “She was very caring; it was she who instilled a sense of discipline in us; she was the one who read bedtime stories to us; she was the one who taught us English.”
The then-youngsters were particularly attached to Marie because of the nature of their parents' jobs. “My father, the late Mohammed Jamil Radwan, was a diplomat posted in Jakarta; my mother, Fatma M. Zain, was a lecturer in Jeddah. Both had very busy work schedules, and so we were left in our nanny's care most of the time at that formative, impressionable age, and so everything good that she did for us remained deep within.”
Radwan said she and her sister may have had 10 nannies after Marie, but “no one could replace her in kindness and goodness, and that is why I wanted to reach her.”
Armed with the nanny's name and that letter, Radwan scoured the Internet. “I went to every single social networking site — Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. I would enter her first name, her middle name, her last name, and the name of her city and her country — everything ... I searched her with every possible permutation and combination, but I drew a blank,” she said.
After three years of off-and-on search, Radwan had almost given up when two weeks ago she Googled “Quezon,” the province from where the letter had been posted.
“I came up with the province's official webpage. On that website was a telephone number. I dialed and spoke with Eva Palma, an assistant in the governor's office. I told her my purpose and gave her the address that was mentioned in the letter. She took down my contact details and promised to call me back. I even e-mailed our nanny's picture to her.”
It seems Palma was not able to find the address, so she contacted Danny Estacio, a journalist at Manila Bulletin newspaper, and passed on all the details to him along with the photo.
Sensing a brilliant story, Estacio ran a piece in his newspaper along with Marie's picture. “Our nanny saw her photograph in the newspaper and came to Palma's office with three albums full of photos that connected her with us,” said Radwan. “All those pictures that are now in the Philippine newspapers and television stations are from her.”
The nanny was then approached by a Philippine television station. GMA News TV's “Kapuso Mo Jessica Soho” got the nanny into the studio, and Radwan was connected from Jeddah. “The two of us saw each other for the first time after 22 years,” she said. “It was an incredible, fascinating fairytale.”
Marie is now in Candelaria, a town in Quezon Province.
Radwan, her mother, sister and a brother, who was very small when Marie left them, are over the moon. “Good people have a way of weaving their way into our hearts. She was extremely nice to us, and the things that she wrote in that famous letter were extremely heartwarming. There was a special note for my younger sister. I was six at that time, and she was four. She doesn't remember her a lot, but from the letter it was pretty evident that Hadeel was Marie's favorite. She called me Roona affectionately and my sister Looli. We called her Dada.”
On the television program, Radwan said to Marie: “Dada, we missed you; we love you, and I hope you are good and happy. I hope you finally found the love of your life and the life that you always wanted. I wish you more blessings. And, I hope to see you soon.”
Radwan wants to thank all those who helped her locate her nanny. “I would like to express my gratitude to Eva Palma for accepting my offer to help find my nanny. I wouldn't have been able to start my initial search without her. I want to thank Estacio for publishing my story and making my voice heard, and lastly I would like to also thank the team at the Kapuso Mo Jessica Soho' television show for taking the time to tell my story and making my nanny the star that she deserves to be.”
For Radwan, all is well that ends well. She wants to meet her in person. “There are so many things that we have planned for her,” she said. “She was our role model, and she will continue to be one — forever.”
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