Quote:JOURNEY TO HELL
Lost mum found after 25 years

76-year-old woman reunited with her kin after a life of begging and poverty

True life is often stranger than fiction. An elderly woman was yesterday reunited with her family 25 years after taking a wrong bus that led her into a life of poverty and confinement.

Jaeyaena Beuraheng, 76, was tearfully reunited with relatives yesterday at Phitsanulok's Wang Thong social service centre.

Twenty-five years ago, Malay-speaking Narathiwat resident Jaeyaena thought she was boarding a bus bound for Narathiwat from Malaysia.

Not being able to read, write or speak Thai, she did not know the bus was headed for Bangkok.

When she arrived in the capital, she tried to get back to the South but compounded her crisis by taking a bus to Chiang Mai instead.

There she spent the next five years begging.

She was arrested in 1987 and has been in the social service centre since then.

Yesterday "overjoyed" relatives arrived in Phitsanulok after a 25-hour journey to take Jaeyaena home.

Her youngest son Mamu, 35, said through a translator that he was 10 when his mother disappeared after going to visit her husband across the border.

Mamu and his seven brothers and sisters searched in vain for years in Thailand and Malaysia until they were told Jaeyaena had been run over by a train in Yala.

They continued to make merit for her every year.

Earlier this month, three students from Mamu's neighbourhood training at the Phitsanulok social service centre - Nuriyanee Waekeuji, 20, Sumaiya Sawaeko, 19, and Arsor Rormeudee, 19 - met Jaeyaena. They photographed her with their mobile telephone and sent the picture to Mamu.

"I was shocked and overjoyed when I saw the picture. It was certainly my mother. I remembered her face, even though I've not seen her for 25 years," Mamu said.

Staff at the centre had for years assumed Jaeyaena was Mon or Shan. The three Narathiwat women were the only ones who had been able to communicate with her.

It was only then that Jaeyaena's tragic story emerged, centre manager Jintana Satjang said.

Source: The Nation Feb. 6, 2007
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Just like a movie
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Yep just like a movie, glad to read that she has been found by her family.

I think her big problem was that people identified her very fast "just as a Mon", otherwise somebody might have tried to find out where she came from and given her a chance to get to her family sooner.

Lots of things you can learn from that story: for example how important it is for a country to have a universally readable script like the Roman alphabet. Through that you can "mediate" a lot like names of places etc. even if you don't know the language of the place you got stranded at.