Timor Leste 1st Lady comes home to Dagupan
SHE could have brought nannies, household staff, security detail and a host of orderlies befitting her stature but the interim First Lady of Timor Leste preferred to keep a low profile when she visited her hometown Dagupan for a vacation.
The wife of Fernando Lasama de Araujo, president of the National Parliament of East Timor, the second highest man in the youngest country in the world, came home almost unnoticed with her only son Hadomi.
Unpretentious and with no penchant for expensive dresses and jewelry, the bespectacled Jacqueline Aquino Siapno Lasama, fondly called Joy, 41, visited Vice Mayor Belen Fernandez in her residence in Barangay Lucao here.
Two days earlier, she and Hadomi arrived in Dagupan by public bus from Pasay City then boarded a motorized tricycle to reach her mother’s home in Bonuan.
Wearing a black dress and tip-toeing on sandals, she looked just like any ordinary woman. But aside from being the wife of the second most powerful man in Timor Leste, she herself has a very impressive credential with her Ph.D. from Berkley University in California.
She visited the vice mayor accompanied Hadomi, mother Corona Varona Aquino, a lawyer, and close relative Marlyn Manaois-Reyna, daughter of the late Dagupan City Mayor Cipriano Manaois, without her usual coterie, i.e., security, nanny for the boy, her personal secretary in East Timor.
“I am very impressed and amazed about the change that was made since 1981 since I left,” said Mrs. Lasama, a political economist, who fluently speaks Pangasinan and Filipino despite her 27 years of absence.
She said East Timor, having just gained its independence in 2002, is still in the very early stages of development. Her mother compares East Timor’s capital, Deli, to Dagupan about 40 years ago.
Joy was only 14 when her mom brought her to the U.S. just after completing her third year high school level at Ednas School.
She continued her studies at St. Nicholas High School in California and after graduation received a scholarship at Wesley College, the same school where U.S. State Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ambassador Madelyn Albright graduated.
The former Jacqueline Aquino Siapno pursued her master’s degree at University of London and then at Berkley University for her PhD.
It was while working for her PhD that she met her future husband Fernando, who was languishing in prison in Jakarta, Indonesia as a political prisoner for seven years due to charges of subversion allegedly committed against the state.
That time, she was writing a book about the struggle for independence in Aceh, Indonesia, where she stayed for several years, and in East Timor.
Love blossomed between the two after exchanging some letters though most of the times, their letters were delayed for six months. After Fernando was released from prison, she went with him to East Timor, where Fernando supported the referendum for independence that gained 79 percent acceptance by the people.
She later established the Deli University.
East Timor‘s president, Jose Ramos-Horta, is not married and since her husband was elected for a six-year term as president of the National Parliament in June 2007, Mrs. Lasama became the interim First Lady of the country.
Joy’s husband is currently on a state visit to Ethiopia. But he canceled his trip to four other countries to be in the Philippines from April 13 to 23, when he will address the Philippine Congress before going to Dagupan to meet his in-laws.—LM
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