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Miracle as Aceh Tsunami Girl Comes Home After 7 Years
Nurdin Hasan | December 24, 2011

Mary, second right, poses for a photograph with her family at their new home in Meulaboh on Friday after their reunion. AP Photo Mary, second right, poses for a photograph with her family at their new home in Meulaboh on Friday after their reunion. AP Photo
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blightyboy
12:37pm Dec 25, 2011

Perhaps if the Chief of Police and the local government stopped worrying about such things as punks and started worrying about the suffering of the citizens of Aceh, such a thing as this could not have happened.

It is a disgrace. One wonders just how many children who disappeared, presumed dead, in the 2004 tsunami, are actually alive, but have been spirited away by people traffickers and sexual deviants?????

Didn't the Police Chief say in his interview with the JG that their were no beggars in Aceh?

gnulab
5:09pm Dec 24, 2011

First it was the mother, now it's the father.

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Banda Aceh. A girl who was ripped from her father’s arms by the tsunami that devastated Aceh in 2004 was reunited with her family on Wednesday in Meulaboh, West Aceh.

Seven years after being separated from her family and after years of being forced to work as a beggar in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, 14-year-old Mary Yuranda got on a bus and tracked down her stunned family.

Mary reportedly disembarked at the Meulaboh bus station after the six-hour trip from the capital. The girl, wearing a blue headscarf, was sitting outside a coffee shop near the bus station looking dejected when a pedicab driver spotted her and struck up a conversation.

Mary told the driver that her family lived in Ujong Baroh village but that she did not know how to get there. The man took her to the village hall, where officials summoned a man by the name of Ibrahim, who the girl said was her grandfather.

Ibrahim initially had doubts that the short-haired teenager before him was the same little girl the family had given up for dead after the tsunami that destroyed much of Meulaboh.

“Her face was not as I remembered it seven years ago,” Ibrahim said.

He summoned Mary’s father, Tarmiyus, 42, who also could not be certain of the girl’s identity. It wasn’t until Mary’s mother, Yusnidar, 35, arrived at the scene that all doubt vanished.

“Mary ran and threw herself into her mother’s arms, shouting ‘Mother,’ and they both started crying,” Ibrahim said.

A birthmark on Mary’s abdomen and a scar on her forehead from a bad fall at the age of 6 dispelled any remaining doubts.

“Her fingers and feet are exactly like those of my child who disappeared in the tsunami,” Yusnidar said. “I have no doubt that she is my daughter. I’m extremely happy. I was convinced my daughter was gone.”

Both of Yusnidar’s daughters disappeared on that terrible day seven years ago. When the tsunami struck on Dec. 26, 2004, Tarmiyus tried to save everyone but was only able to keep hold of his wife and their 1-year-old son. His daughters were ripped from his grasp by the surge.

The family’s home was destroyed. They now live in a house built for them by a nongovernmental organization in another part of the city.

“We looked everywhere for our two daughters, to no avail,” Tarmiyus said, recalling years of desperate searching.

Yusnidar said that every time there was a report of a child believed killed in the tsunami surfacing, they rushed to check in the hope it was their daughter.

Mary said someone had taken her to Banda Aceh, where she was taken in by a widow who renamed her Herawati. She was also given a job, begging on the street.

While the widow treated her well, Mary said, the man who made her beg beat her frequently.

She finally gathered the courage to leave and attempt to find her family in Meulaboh. The widow, she said, took her to the bus station in Banda Aceh.

More than 170,000 people in Aceh were killed in the tsunami.