(From left) Moi Eng, Thai Wei, Thai Soon are seen holding their respective MyKads while Dorrena holds her MyKad and birth certificate and Chee Choi showing their marriage certificate.
Chee Choi and Dorrena show their birth and marriage certificates.
SIBU: An error in her birth certificate denied her from getting a MyKad, and all this while she thought it was okay, but she has been proven wrong.
Dorrena Ingan, 31, was born in Long Lama, Baram. The column for ‘Nationality’ in her birth certificate is blank. No one bothered to check.
Not long after birth, Dorrena was adopted by a family from another longhouse. Still nothing was done to correct the error in her birth certificate. Problem first cropped up when Dorrena wanted to register her marriage with Yap Chee Choi in 1996. Registration could not be done because she did not have a MyKad. Yap, 41, comes from Stabau in Sibu.
They became husband and wife anyway, albeit, illegal relationship in the eyes of the law.
When their son Yap Thai Soon turned 12, they could not get him a MyKad because he came from an ‘illegitimate’ marriage. That was four years ago. The elder Yap thought his son having a birth certificate would suffice for his (son’s) application for a MyKad.
“I was wrong. I have other children besides Thai Soon. The same problem will surface in time to come.
“And, can I get my children to study in secondary school without them having their MyKads? I’m worried,” he lamented, adding that he had sought help from a member of a political party but to no avail.
In fact, his second child Yap Moi Eng, 14, faced the same problem when she applied for a MyKad when she turned 12.
The couple has two other children –13-year-old daughter Mei Hui and a 3-year-old son Thai Wei.
When Thai Wei was born, the family encountered a problem which Yap said was a big problem but did not want to elaborate.
He said the problem was big enough to prompt him to travel long hours to Long Lama in Baram to look for Dorrena’s biological and adoptive parents.
“I spent six months for trips to and fro between Sibu and Baram just to get someone to confirm that my wife is indeed a Malaysian,” he said. He said a longhouse chief eventually certified that Dorrena was a Malaysian and that she was from his longhouse.
“In 2011, my wife got her MyKad, and among the first few things we did was to legitimise our marriage and get out children their MyKads,” he said, smiling.
Yap said as much as he had learned a lesson he hoped others would learn from their mistake. “Don’t take the content of our documents like birth certificate, MyKad lightly.”