In June 2014, an Indonesian family got to experience what they called a miracle.
They found their daughter, Raudhatul Jannah, who had been missing for nearly 10 years after being swept away by the terrible 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The reunion happened through a strange series of events that started with a dream that kept happening again and again.
According to NBC News, Raudhatul was just four years old when the huge tsunami hit her home in Meulaboh, Aceh province, on December 26, 2004. She and her seven year old brother, Arif Pratama Rangkuti, were holding onto a wooden plank with their parents when the waves pulled them away from their father. The children’s mother, Jamaliah, and father, Septi Rangkuti, lived through the disaster but lost both children in the chaos. They looked for them for a month and a half before giving up hope and moving to North Sumatra to stay with relatives.
The path to finding each other again started when Jamaliah’s brother, Zainuddin, had the same dream three nights in a row about a girl whose headscarf fell away from her hair. The morning after the third dream, he went to a local cafe and was shocked to see a girl who looked exactly like the one from his dreams. “The way she shook her head, gazed and smiled, it was all identical with the girl in my dream,” he said. After asking around, he found out the girl was a tsunami orphan who had been swept to the remote Banyak Islands, about six and a half hours by car and boat from Meulaboh.
How the family found each other after years apart
A fisherman had found Raudhatul and her brother on the islands after the tsunami and brought them back to the mainland. The girl, who had been living under the name Weniati, was taken in by the fisherman’s mother and raised by several relatives in one foster family. She remembered very little about her life before the disaster and only had a fourth grade education. She helped her foster family by picking up laundry from neighbors.
The miracle of life:
— مهند الحسون (@AlmuhanadSA) August 9, 2014
Raudhatul Jannah, #Indonesian girl lost in 2004 #Tsunami reunited with her parents 10 years on pic.twitter.com/CLx68lgpvd
In July, Jamaliah and Rangkuti traveled to meet the girl, though the mother found it hard at first to tell if she was really her daughter after so much time had gone by. The big moment came when Jamaliah took the girl back to Meulaboh to celebrate the end of Ramadan. When they went to Jamaliah’s mother’s house, which had made it through the tsunami, the girl suddenly remembered things from when she was little. “She remembered the chicken coop and the rambutan tree,” Jamaliah said. “She remembered waiting for durian that her grandmother used to give her.”
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed more than 230,000 people across 14 countries, with Aceh province in Indonesia recording nearly three quarters of the deaths. Around 37,000 bodies were never found and were thought to have been 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. Like other bizarre missing person cases that continue to puzzle investigators, not knowing what happened to missing children left many parents with grief that never went away.
The touching reunion got a lot of media coverage across Indonesia, which led to another amazing thing happening. In August 2014, just weeks after finding their daughter, the family got a call from a couple in Payakumbuh who thought they had seen their son, Arif. The teenager, who had been living on the streets and sleeping outside an internet cafe, was shown a picture of Jamaliah and right away said, “That’s mother!” Just like the story of a New Jersey man who learned he had been missing since childhood, the boy had been living under a different name for years. The family was finally back together with both children after 10 years apart.
