Culture | December 22, 2011 | 9 comments

Girl taken by Indonesian tsunami found after 7 years

source: http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/girl-taken-by-tsunami-found-after-7-years-2011122...

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JanforGore
A young girl swept away in the tsunami in Indonesia seven years ago and thought to have died has finally found her way back to her family.

The girl, named Wati, was eight years old when her village of Ujong Baroh in Aceh province was hit by the tsunami, Indonesia's Antara news agency reports on its website.

Her mother, Yusniar, was trying to take her and her two siblings to a safe place, but Wati lost her grip on her and was carried away by the water.

Yusniar was able to save her two other children, but family believed Wati was lost because nobody in the neighbourhood saw her again.

On Wednesday, her grandfather Ibrahim in Meulaboh city in Aceh province was visited by an acquaintance accompanied by a teenage girl.

The man said the girl had come to his coffee shop and told him she had come to Meulaboh by bus and was trying to find her way back home, but did not know how.

She could not remember any of her parents' or relatives' names except Ibrahim.

Ibrahim was soon convinced the girl was his long-lost granddaughter and her parents later confirmed her identity from a mole and a scar over her eyebrow that Wati got when she was six years old.

It's not known what happened to Wati after she was carried away by the tsunami, or where she has been for the past seven years.
  1. groups:
    Culture,   Water Is Life,   Spirituality and Humanism,   Sundancer,   1 more
  2. tags:
    World News,  Indonesia,  Tsunami,  Inspirational,  1 more
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9 comments // Girl taken by Indonesian tsunami found after 7 years

  • JanforGore
  • Varex_Sythe
    • +3
      Varex_Sythe  

    • Wonderful, amazing, story of a family being reunited.. Why can't things like this not only make the major news networks, but also be given a large segment with lots of interviews and details?

    • 5 months ago
  • JanforGore
    • +4
      JanforGore  
    • Image

    • http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/indonesia/8974963/Indonesian-tsun...
      Here's more to this story.

      Mary Yuranda, now 14, was finally allowed to go free by the woman who had given her shelter and persuaded a taxi driver to take her to a city in Aceh near her home village.

      The remarkable story of the teenager's reappearance many years after her parents believed she had perished in the Boxing Day 2004 tidal wave that killed 168,000 in Aceh alone stunned her family.

      "I cannot tell you how grateful I am," said her mother Yusnidar, speaking by phone to the Agence France-Presse news agency from her home village of Ujong Baroh.

      Any doubts that the girl was her daughter were put aside when she revealed birthmarks on her stomach and an unmistakable scar on her face.

      "The birthmarks on her belly, and a mole and scar on her face proved that the little girl was mine," added mother Yusnidar, who uses just one name like many Indonesians.

      She had last seen her daughter when she was ripped from her grasp by the powerful wave that slammed into Aceh, killing a total of 230,000 people across a swath of south and south-east Asia.

      Yusnidar had been trying to get her three children to safety when the tsunami triggered by an huge earthquake hit. She lost Mary Yuranda and her eldest daughter, who remains missing, in the chaos.

      The girl's father, Tarmius, 42, said she had been taken in by a woman shortly after the tsunami. Many children were orphaned in the cataclysm and families who had lost children themselves often gave them homes.

      But the girl's father also said she told him that the woman had put her to work begging on the street in the remote and impoverished part of Indonesia.

      However, the woman eventually allowed her to go free and a taxi driver took her to the city Meulaboh in Aceh province. She was discovered in a café in the city where people thought she was a beggar.

    • 5 months ago
  • rerushg
  • JanforGore
    • +1
      JanforGore  
    • rerushg:

      It is an inspirational story. To think she was gone for seven years and could only remember her grandfather's name... he surely must have made quite an impression on her young life, and his love brought her home. It is incredible.

    • 5 months ago
  • artemis6
  • JanforGore
  • EthicalVegan
  • JanforGore
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