Johannesburg - “Do you know me?” Mamorena Mabe asked loudly, bending forward inches from the man’s face. “We’ve come to fetch you… We’ve come to take you home.”
Mamorena and a handful of relatives had been waiting for Saturday’s reunion with Khati Mabe for nearly 30 years – it might not have been in the desired circumstances, but it was a momentous occasion nonetheless.
She gripped him tightly as she and her relatives helped him get up from his wheelchair to slowly walk out of the Parkcare Frail Centre’s “Forget-me-not” building section for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia in Parktown, Joburg.
It was by God’s grace that they found him, Mamorena said.
“I felt like I was going crazy when they told me he had been found and was alive… I couldn’t believe it until I was sent a picture on my phone,” she said.
Mabe, 59, cannot talk and is frail, but his face brimmed with a smile on Saturday as he walked out of the centre with his family.
He was admitted to the centre in August after having been admitted at South Rand Hospital in November last year.
And, had it not been for the staff of the centre’s tireless efforts to track the man’s identity and family, his reunion with his estranged family might never have happened.
“They (South Rand) called our social workers, saying they had a gentleman who couldn’t talk and had had a head injury. They didn’t know who he was or where he was from,” said Dinah Ndlovu, a social auxiliary worker at the centre.
Mabe, originally from Qwa-Qwa, left his family in 1985 to come to Joburg.
“We’ve been searching for him for so long. In 2009, we went in search of him to Soweto, where a lady said she knew him. But when we went back to her for a second time, she claimed she didn’t know him,” said Mabe’s nephew Abram.
Ndlovu said when Mabe was brought in, he had his SA Social Security Agency card and ZCC church card on him, and as he could not talk, she decided to reach out to the church.
“I asked a nurse we work with to ask church leaders at one of the Thokoza branches whether they knew him, because that’s where the card was from.”
Ndlovu said after an endless search, she was referred to William Molokomme, a member at one of the Thokoza branches.
He positively identified Mabe as a church congregant and also began a search for his family.
He eventually traced the family, and accompanied them to the centre on September 13.
The Star