This is a VERY interesting story! This young girl washed away and was presumed dead seven years ago. Then in December she appeared on her
grandparents doorstep. She had survived and been enslaved .. and she says there are others like her. Tsunami orphans who are forced by some very bad
people to beg and steal for them. Kind of Oliver Twist ... but with a Tsunami and an Indonesian setting.
Blobal Post Asia-Pacific News
MEULABOH, Indonesia — The girl who came home hardly resembled the girl who washed away.
Seven years had passed since Meri Yulanda disappeared beneath the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami’s waves. The roughly 160,000 killed by the disaster in
Aceh, Indonesia, were long buried. Bodies that couldn’t be identified were laid to rest in mass graves. Meri was believed to be among them.
But in late December, Meri appeared on her grandfather’s stoop. She was alive but not well: her lips were scabby, her back purple with welts, her
clothes torn and filthy. A small child when the waves struck, Meri was now 15. She spoke her Acehnese dialect in a strange garble and offered a
bizarre account of abduction, enslavement and escape.
The childs parents are still alive and had this to say about the woman - Fatima - who kept their little girl captive for seven years after the Tsunami
tragedy and who let her whole family think that she had died a horrid death by drowning -
Meri was eventually dropped off at Ibrahim’s home, a sea-foam green abode rebuilt after the tsunami. That night, she was reintroduced to her
parents: Tarmiyus (Ibrahim’s son) and Yusnidar. The couple’s disbelief faded only when they discovered a dark birthmark on her side — identical
to their lost daughter’s, they said — and a familiar scar by her eye acquired from a nasty spill at the age of 6.
“In a way, I’m almost grateful for what Fatima did,” Tarmiyus said. “If she was loving towards Meri, she wouldn’t have come home to us.
Because she was cruel, Meri came back into our lives.” His wife is less forgiving. “Meri says she can recognize Fatima,” Yusnidar said. “So
if I ever find her, I’ll eat her alive.”
God bless Meri's mother - Yusnidar. She's ticked. That's very understandable. I hope they find this Fatima woman who has been keeping these poor
children hostage and who is forcing them to steal. If it were my daughter and family that this happened to ... that Fatima woman would be praying for
death when I got my hands on her ...
