10 years after tsunami, daughter returns home

Raised in foster home, girl lost in flood found by parents who never lost hope

It was just before 8 am on Dec 26, 2004. The sky was blue, and Jamaliah was hanging clothes on the line while her three kids were inside watching TV on a sleepy Sunday. In a second, everything changed.

Her husband, Septi Rangkuti, and the children ran to the street where their house sat about 500 meters from the sea.

Jamaliah then heard people screaming: "The water is coming! The water is coming!"

The family of five leaped onto a motorbike and made it as far as the market, but they could not outrun the wall of black water.

Jamaliah and her 8-year-old son were pulled away by the wave. As they somersaulted in the darkness, the mother was able to hold onto his hand while grabbing onto a pole.

Rangkuti managed to keep hold of his 7-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter long enough to put them on top of a large floating board. He held on as long as he could, but when the water sucked back to the sea, his fingers slipped. The last thing he remembers is his two little ones being dragged away from him by the angry torrent.

Some 230,000 people in 14 countries were killed, and about 37,000 bodies were never recovered, presumed swept out to sea.

Most of the 1,500 children found after the disaster were returned to their families or taken in by neighbors or friends, though some ended up in orphanages. News of a few miraculous meetings over the years left some parents wondering if their own kids might still be alive.

Tsunami orphan

Jamaliah and Rangkuti spent a month and a half searching for their son, Arif Pratama, and their daughter, Raudhatul Jannah. Time passed, and the family tried to move on. Jamaliah had a baby boy two years after the tsunami, but neither gave up hope they would one day find their lost children.

"I believed it in my heart," Jamaliah said. "I prayed every night because of the strong emotional connection to my kids. I believed we would be together again."

This summer, Jamaliah's older brother, Zainuddin, called to say he'd had a dream three nights in a row about a girl in Banda Aceh. The morning after, he visited a cafe not far from his house and was shocked to see a girl like the one from his dreams, and who looked just like a younger version of Jamaliah.

He discovered that the girl was a tsunami orphan. Zainuddin talked to the foster family and discovered that after the disaster, a fisherman found her and a boy on the sparsely populated Banyak islands, about six and a half hours by car and boat from Jamaliah's house in Meulaboh.

The girl had little memory of life before the tsunami.

"I remember when we were on the board. I was there with my brother," she said. "I was found by someone on the beach and taken to a house. That's where we were split. Someone took me and someone took my brother."

In July, Jamaliah and Rangkuti traveled 100 kilometers by bus to meet the girl. At first sight, the mother said it was hard to tell if she was really her child - so much time had passed.

Jamaliah asked to take her back to Meulaboh, where they had lived when the tsunami hit, to celebrate the end of Ramadan. The desperate mother said she prayed for a sign that the girl would remember something from her childhood.

Memories

But so much had changed in Meulaboh, as landmarks and houses the girl might have remembered have been largely replaced by buildings financed by billions of dollars in international aid.

But one important place escaped the tsunami: A house that belonged to Jamaliah's mother. When the girl saw it, memories of eating sweet tropical fruit came back.

"She remembered the chicken coop and the rambutan tree," Jamaliah said, smiling. "She remembered waiting for durian that her grandmother used to give her."

This was all the sign she needed.

Refugee children try to catch relief goods tossed from an Australian military helicopter in a rice paddy near Banda Aceh, Indonesia, in January 2005. The city was hardest hit by the Dec 26, 2004, tsunami that killed more than 115,000. Eugene Hoshiko / Associated Press

(China Daily 12/26/2014 page11)