The Trust Founder: Surapee Mudita Karnasuta
Surapee Mudita Karnasuta (Mudita) was born in Bangkok, Thailand into a very privileged family. Her father was Suchart (Thienlai) Karnasuta, a very successful businessman and her mother was Areerat Devahsadin, who comes from a long standing aristocratic Thai family known to go back over 400 years.
During the Second World War she would go for a ride with her father driving around Bangkok to see the devastation caused by bombing after the air raids. But the view that captured her attention was not the damage caused by the bombs but the children wandering in the streets on their own, begging, without mothers or fathers accompanying them. Being a child herself (she was four years old at the time) she became very curious as to why they were on their own and what had happened to these children’s parents.
They were the children of prostitutes, her father explained; young women who had to sell their bodies because they were so poor. These children were shunned by society. They would not have any prospects of going to school and most probably be forced by circumstances to follow the fate of their mothers’.
Her father’s answer had a profound effect on Mudita. Seeing children of her own age but living a life very different from her own affected her deeply. An overwhelming desire to help these children took root inside her mind – it was the beginning!
Mudita’s schooling life started at the Mater Dei convent school in Bangkok, continued in Penang, and then she went on to study at the Conservatoire of Music in Sydney, Australia. In 1969 she came to England and found herself working with Bernard and Laura Ashley, where she modelled and publicised their first “Victorian” dress which became a huge success. She was to stay with them for six years working as their general manageress.
Inspired to introduce the cultures of her native country, in 1970 Mudita opened her first traditional Thai restaurant, The Siam, in Kensington, London. Many more restaurants were to follow and in 1991 she moved to Newcastle for health reasons. There, a chance-meeting with a friend, and a casual reading of a Thai newspaper: two events that were to lead to transforming a childhood desire, which has never diminished after all these years, into reality.
In the newspaper there was an article about child prostitution in Thailand. In her mind’s eye she could suddenly recall the children of the prostitutes begging in the streets from forty years ago. Mudita realised to her sorrow that children like those from her childhood days have themselves become prostitutes.
It was time for action! She immediately wrote to the Charity Commissioners stating her wish to set up a charity trust to help such children. Initially, the name had not been decided but Venerable Ajahn Sumedho, a Buddhist monk who had been the source of her spiritual guidance, suggested “Mudita", which in Sanskrit means “rejoicing in others' good fortune”. (Incidentally, he was also the one who gave the name Mudita to Mudita a few years earlier because of her unselfish nature!).
She and her good friend Khun Namtip Milligan (now a trustee) sold their old clothes and raised £34.50; their very first fund raising effort! A bank account was then opened with this money and so began the foundation for the Mudita Trust.
Mudita moved to West Sussex in 1992, to The Hamilton Arms in Stedham, near Midhurst where she now lives and runs the Pub and Nava Thai Restaurant with her business partner Suhail Hussain. The trust was granted a charity status with the registration number 1029665 in 1993 and The Hamilton Arms became the Head Office.
A personal letter from Mudita - click here to read.
