BEIJING: Su Xiao, 49, and Xu Guangchun, 42, are like-minded souls in the streets of the bustling Chinese capital of Beijing, checking surveillance cameras and consulting passers-by, with a near-constant barrage of calls on their phones.
Whom they are seeking to help are senior citizens with Alzheimer’s disease, a hard-hitting disease that can easily erase out the patient’s memory and other major mental functions.
Seven years ago, Su and Xu co-founded the Beijing Voluntary Emergency Rescue Service Center, which launched a public welfare campaign to help those fraught families find their lost elders in 2016.
Su, an outdoor sports lover, is a seasoned professional in mountain rescue. On New Year’s Day of 2016, he was on his way to a nearby ski resort where he ran into a listless and pale elderly woman who was holding a sack and shivering in the cold under an overbridge.
She was mumbling, saying that she was about to buy noodles for her son, reminded Su of his grandmother, an Alzheimer’s patient. “A lady of her age and with such health conditions was most likely unable to take care of her children,” recalled Su.
Su reported to the police without hesitation and the police managed to find a scrap of paper with a contact number in the lost elderly’s pocket. It turned out that days had passed since the elderly lost connection with her family and she traveled more than 40 km from home in southwestern Beijing to the unfamiliar place in the city’s east.
“Before her way back home, the old lady just clutched me, begging me for food stamps so that she could go buy noodles,” Su said. However, food stamps were things of decades ago back in the era when China was still of a planned economy.
Though almost losing all recent memories, patients who suffer from the illness often have vivid recollections of things that happened a long time ago.
They can easily get lost even in familiar environments. – Agencies
