Download Meri Yulanda was ripped from her father’s arms by the tsunami that devastated Aceh in 2004 which killed 230,000 people.
Tens of thousands of bodies were never recovered and many families never found out what happened to their loved ones.
Meri’s family thought she was amongst the dead.
But seven years later to the great surprise of her family she has come home to Meulaboh in the west of Aceh.
Rebecca Henschke has her families extraordinary story.
“My name is Tarmius I was born in 1965 so I am around 52 years old. I live in Aceh.
“On the day of the tsunami, I was getting ready for work when the earthquake hit. I was with my three children- Yulisa, Meri and Ari and my wife. I gathered them together. Then I heard people saying ‘the water's rising!’ We jumped into the car and started heading for the mountains. We got about 100 metres from our house before we were hit by this strong surge of water. The car started floating. I took Yuli and Meri to a nearby house and put them on a porch that was 2 meters wide. The youngest one, Ari Yuranda, was with her mum. When the water came for the first time Meri survived. When a large fishing boat came my way, I went underwater with my third child, Ari Yuranda, I closed his mouth, I went underwater. After the boats passed by I went up and realised that my two other children were no longer on the porch where I left them. I went to a field, and took refuge there. I didn't see my two children after that, I didn't know if they had survived.”
“ After the tsunami I looked everywhere. I went to all the refugee camps in West Aceh looking for my children. I looked everywhere but I couldn’t find them. My brothers and lots of relatives and friends helped me but we couldn’t find out any information at all.”
Meri Yulanda was eight years old when the tsunami hit Aceh.
She remembers very little of what happened that day.
She just knows that somehow she ended up in the regional capital Banda Aceh more than 200 kilometres from her home town.
There she was taken in by a widow who renamed her Ira.
“I was told to beg on the streets. If I didn’t then I was beaten. If I didn’t get her money then I was beaten.”
Q. Did you remember that you had a family?
“I remembered but I was not allowed to go home. I remembered my mother, father, grandmother. I remembered that my grandfathers name was Ibrahim.”
Q. Did you ever ask to go home?
“Yes I asked but she told me that my family had died in the tsunami. I didn’t know what to think. If I didn’t beg then I was beaten. My hair was cut short. Every day all day I begged on the street into the evening. If I didn’t earn 50,000 (5 US dollas) then I didn’t eat. If I got money then I could eat.”
Q. So how did you return home to Meulaboh? Can you tell the story of how you got home? Did someone bring you home?
“I came home by myself.”
Q. How?
“It’s a story.....”
Meri looks at the ground. Her grandfather Ibrahim Nur steps in and takes up the story.
“The reason that she could come home to Meulaboh in the end was that she had grown up, she became embarrased about begging, she was ashamed and wasn’t earning any money that way. She was too old for begging and needed to look for alternative work. But the women that was looking after her kept forcing her to beg. She was beaten, her hair cut...so in the end she ran away.”
Q. How’s Meri’s physical and mental condition after what she has been through?
“She was 7 when she went missing so it’s impossible to compare her with the girl we knew. She has changed a lot. After she fled the beating she ran to the bus terminal in Banda Aceh and ask for help to find the L300 bus to Meulaboh, she got aboard to look for her mum and dad. She got off at the bus terminal in Meulaboh and then walked to the central shopping mall, this is what Mary told me. There she started asking people if they knew where to find her father or mother. No one knew them but a street seller sent her in a cycle rickshall to the village chiefs house.”
“I met my daughter again at the village chiefs house. I had just got home around the evening call to pray. I had been fishing so I was dirty and went home to wash. A friend called and asked me ‘you lost a child didn’t you?’ I said ‘ No I have not lost a child’ he said not today but during the tsunami. And I said oh yes. He said according to this girl one of my missing daughters was at the village chief’s house. I though how could it be my child! But my friend said she says her father is you and her mother is Yusnidar and her grandfather is Ibrahim. So I got on my motorbike straight away and went there to see. There were around 50 people crowded in the room. I didn’t introduce myself or say anything. The village chief asked her ‘is your father amongst this crowd? She pointed at me. In my heart I thought that’s not my child. I called my wife and told her to come straight away. She came and the village chief asked her is your mother in the room and she pointed to her mum. My wife said, if you are my child then you have a birthmark on your stomach. She checked and yes it was true there was the birthmark....so we knew for sure that this was our daughter.”
Q. How did you feel when you realised it was your daughter?
“So happy....very happy! Incredible happiness it’s hard to describe we were just very happy.
Q. How’s Meri’s condition now?
“She is not well. I am not sure if it was because she was abused by someone or she is still dramatised by the tsunami. She just not well.”
Meri cries out when asked what she would do if she met the women who took her after the tsunami.
“I don’t want go! I don’t want to go with her again! ( hysterical)
Q. Now that you are home – what do you like doing?
“I just like staying at home. Sitting.”
Q. Before the tsunami did you go to school?
“Yes I was in grade 3 at junior high school.”
Q. What are your hopes and dreams now?
“I don’t really have any...I just want to go back to school.”
Q. Can you read and write?
“I don’t know how to read and write anymore. Before I was one of the smartest in my class... I was smart before, I always got good marks at school.”
Q. As a father what’s your hopes for your daughter now?
“My hopes for my daughter? Ah well people say that we are people with nothing...poor people that’s what people say. But we will love and look after her as any parent would so that she can heal and return to the girl she was and live a purposful life.”
His eldest daughter is still missing.
And their house and all their pocessions were completely destoryed in the tsunami. They now live in a house provided by a Buddhist charity.
But her father says they have no plans to take Meri’s case further.
Tarmius says he just wants to met the women who took Meri...
“I want to met her, I want to say thank-you, I don’t want to see her arrested or punished. If she loved my child and looked after her then I would never have seen my daughter again. Because she was cruel to her my child she found her way home. For that I am thankful. I don’t have any feeling of anger or need for revenge. Instead I feel grateful that she was cruel to my child so that she has come home to us.”
Nearly 200,000 people were killed in Aceh province alone in the tsunami.
Many families continue to hold out hope for finding their loved ones, but reunions are rare.
“My message to people who have taken tsunami children is return them to their parents. I don’t want to see the same thing happen to another child as what happened to my daughter. If someone got a tsunami child then return them to where they came from, to their parents. Don’t mistreat the child in the way my child was mistreated....send them home.”
Acehnese fisherman Tarmius Yulanda who was recently reunited with his daughter who he thought had died seven years ago in the Asian tsunami.
He was speaking with a journalist from KBR68H network station Dalka FM in Melauboh, Aceh.
