On
the morning of December 26, one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded
triggered devastating tsunamis that was so enormous it swamped the entire coastal
areas of northern and western Sumatra. The
tsunami lasted between 15 and 30 minutes and in that short time, killed 250,000
people across 14 nations. Another 37,000 are still missing all these years
later and at least 655,000 people were left homeless.
The
devastation in the Indonesian province of Aceh was incredible. The nearby city
of
Banda
Aceh had a population of about 300,000 before the tsunami. More than 31,000 people
were killed almost instantly and over one thousand bodies found on the streets
in the provincial capital of Banda Aceh were placed in mass graves without
waiting for identification as officials quickly tried to keep the sanitation
situation from worsening.
The
family of Jamaliah and Septi Rangkuti, who lived in West Aceh District were
caught in the mass confusion that followed the earthquake and flood.
It was a
Sunday morning at almost 8:00 AM. Jamaliah was hanging the family wash on a
clothesline. Her children were in the house watching cartoons on television.
Then the earthquake hit with a 9.1 magnitude. Jamaliah, husband, Septi Rangkuti, ran from his bed and collected his children and ran out on to
the sidewalk in front of their house which sat less than 600 feet from the
shoreline.
When
the tsunami struck their home Septi Rangkuti grabbed his three children, Raudhatul
Jannah, then 4, and Arif Pratama Rangkuti, 7 and tossed them atop a long wooden
plank that floated past them. His wife, Jamaliah, and he pushed the children,
frantically trying to stay ahead of the waters but they couldn’t outrun the
massive wave that followed the initial floodwaters. When high waters hit, at
an incredible speed and strength, the family was separated. No one in the
family could swim. Later, when he waters subsided, Septi managed to locate his
wife. They began a desperate search for their children. They searched for weeks
before they resigned themselves to the traffic truth their children dead. One
of their children, the eldest son, had survived.
An
entire decade passed. In early 2014, Jamaliah’s brother older brother,
Zainuddin
phoned
his sister and said that for four nights in a row her daughter had come to him
in his dreams. “A girl came to me, calling me Papa, and sat on my lap,” he
would later recall. “As she sat there, one of her hairs slowly fell from her
head to the ground.” When he woke up he worried that something had happened to
one of his daughters, but they were fine
They
both dismissed it. However, the next morning, Zainuddin was in a coffee shop when he saw a girl who was walking home from school,
who bore a striking resemblance to his niece, Raudhatul, who had drowned with
her brother in the tsunami ten years before.
He
figured the girl to be about 14 years old, the age, the same age Raudhatul would
have been had she not drowned in the flood. He couldn’t get the girl out of his
mind and the next day he returned to the neighborhood and tracked the girl
down. It turned out that the girl had been swept to the neighboring Banyak
Island…..80 miles away from where she was separated from her family…… in the
tsunami 10 years before where a fisherman named Mustamir Zai rescued her and
brought her to his mother, who had raised her ever since.
When he told his sister that he had found her
daughter, she refused to believe him and continued to refuse to believe him
until they were reunited in June that year. Sadly, Raudhatul had almost no memory
of her life before the tragedy. "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."
Jamaliah
and Septi Rangkuti decided that if their daughter had survived the waters, then
it was entirely possible that their son Arif had survived as well. The international
media, spurred on by the miraculous discovery of the Rangkuti’s daughter,
joined the search.
It
took less than a month to find Arif. He too had floated on the board to the island and had been living as a street orphan
for years, sleeping in outdoor markets and abandoned shops.
A
woman named Lana Bestir in West Sumatra had been feeding a homeless boy for
years after he turned up sleeping outside of an Internet café that she owned. Bestir and
her husband had a difficult time communicating since the boy could not speak
Indonesian well, or the local dialect, and did not know his name so they dubbed
him Ucok. The child had a massive and ugly scar on his forehead and explained
that somebody
had poured boiling water on his head. He remained on the streets, begging for
food. The Bestir’s tried to register Ucok in school, but he refused all offers
of help beyond his immediate needs.
When
Bestir saw a photo of the boy taken before the tsunami, on the internet, she
was shocked. Without telling him who it was, she showed the boy a photo of Jamaliah
and asked if he knew who she was. “I did not tell him that it was of a woman
looking for a missing son from the tsunami,” Bestir later recalled “Ucok stared
at the picture for a moment and then said ‘Ma.’ At first, I did not believe it,
so I asked him what his mother’s name was. He said ‘Liah.’” (Liah is short for
Jamaliah, and is a name used by some of her friends to address her.) “I said,
‘OK, where are you from?’ and he replied that he was from Aceh. I asked him why
he was here and Ucok began to cry. “There was a big wave,” he replied.
Bister
took the boys photo and brought it to a television reporter who took the photo
to Jamaliah, but she wasn’t sure. The boy in the photo was a young teen, his
hair hung down over his ears and he was much darker than Arif had been, and his
forehead also bore that melted scar. Jamaliah told the reporter that he son had
fallen off the roof as a young boy and that the fall left a scar on the right
side of his nose. The reporter phoned the Bister’s to check and they confirmed
the scar on the boys nose.
The
Bestir’s put Ucok on speakerphone and called Jamaliah. On hearing her voice,
Ucok said: “Ma, please come and take me. I want to go back to Aceh.” Jamaliah
asked where he was staying, and Ucok replied that he had no home, not even a
blanket.
The
following day Jamaliah and Septi Rangkuti rushed to the Bestir’s home to
collect their long lost son only to find out that he was missing. The local
police eventually found him, sleeping, inside a local graveyard. Upon meeting
his family, his first words were
“How is my bicycle?” (Arif had a bike as a
young boy.)
He
said that he remembered washing up on the beach and that he was eventually
taken to live with a family, but he couldn’t remember where they lived or what
their names were. He told a horrifying that one day when he stayed in bed too long, a woman in the house threw scalding
coffee in his face. After that, he ran away and lived on the streets.
Jamaliah
took her son home but it wasn’t a joyful reunion. Arif, he was no longer called
Ucok was enrolled in a special needs school; he was 17 but had not had any
education for at least seven years. Like
tens of thousands of other children whose lives were destroyed by the flood, he
is still badly traumatized. He has the mentality of a much younger child. Arif
had been a top student, a bright child,
but the street child didn’t know his own name and could hardly speak any
language. Even after he was safely returned to his parents Arif kept going to
the neighbors, begging for money and food. "I was sad at first,"
Jamaliah recalled. "But then I said, 'Whatever happened to my son, I've
been waiting so long, I can be patient and take care of him now.'"
But there are questions about the reunion,
which seems almost too remarkable to be true. The family who cared for the
daughter, Raudhatul, for the past 10 years, later denied that she was a tsunami
orphan. According to them, the local
fisherman who found the girl, Zai, had brought her back to his town after
traveling to the Banyak Islands to dive for sea cucumbers, a delicacy in Asia.
The girl had lived with Zai, his wife, and their three sons in Blangpidie for
about two years. When the family moved to Medan, on the opposite coast, the
girl stayed behind with Zai’s sister-in-law. When the sister-in-law relocated
to another part of Sumatra, the girl was placed in the care of Zai’s
mother-in-law, a widow who spent her days in Blangpidie collecting cockle clams
in an estuary, and plastic bottles from the beach to sell to recyclers.
Ida
Maryam, who looked after Raudhatul for five years, said “She is not a tsunami
victim. She is an orphan from a couple from Banyak Island. She lived with her
grandmother in Pulau Banyak before being brought by my sister to Aceh to us,
her grandmother never said she was a tsunami victim, only that she is an
orphan. She actually has two siblings that are now still living with her
grandmother in the Banyak Islands. I have no idea why people are saying she is
a tsunami victim”
For
her part, Raudhatul had never talked about her life before the fisherman
returned with her. Nor could she recall her own name when she arrived from the
islands. (The family renamed her “Weni”)
When
word that Jamaliah and Septi Rangkuti had traveled to the island where the
girl was living to identify her, Zai, the fisherman, was livid. He phoned Jamaliah and Septi Rangkuti and told
them that the girl was not a tsunami orphan but rather the orphaned daughter of
one of his cousins from the Banyak Islands.
A
DNA test cost, at a minimum, $1,000 American dollars, a sum far, far greater
than any of the players involved in the story could hope to afford. However, when
government officials said they would pay for the DNA exam, Zai backed off. He
seemed oddly reluctant to involve the authorities.
But
there was still doubt. Then the man who had helped Zainuddin, Jamaliah’s
brother, find Raudhatul was named Rusmadi. (Like some other Indonesians, he
uses a single name.) he had been a former
local
commander of the Free Aceh Movement, a radical separationist movement. He came
forward to say that he was related to the fisherman Zai’s wife. He said that
Zai had told him ten years before that Raudhatul was a local orphan who had family on the island, which, Rusmadi said.
Made him wonder why none of the family ever came to visit the girl. He said he was also annoyed when Raudhatul was
passed around to Zai’s relatives rather
then being sent back to the Banyak Islands to live among her extended family
there, if, in fact, they existed. He also recalled that one day he overheard an
argument between a young Raudhatul and a boy who tried to insult her by calling
her a “tsunami victim” and that she replied “Yes, I am, and you should respect
me because of that.”
During
the armed rebellion on the island, troops under Rusmadi, in a case of mistaken
identity, had taken a fishermen Gaipe, prisoner. Rusmadi had intervened and got Gaipe
released. In May of 2013, Gaipe came to
visit Rusmadi and thank him for his help. During the visit, Gaipe said ‘How is
the condition of the tsunami victim that my brother brought here?’” Unknown to Rusmadi, Gaipe was Zai’s brother.
“He explained that he was the one who had rescued Raudhatul at sea, along with
her brother, and had taken them to the Banyak Islands.”
When
Arif saw his uncle Zainuddin, he shouted out “Baba” , just as he had called him
before the flood. Zainuddin said
whatever one was thinking, that if Zai had lied about Raudhatul being a tsunami
survivor, he more than probably knew about Arif being alive as well, in fact,
he more than probably came across the two children together and elected only to
take the girl, leaving the boy to the streets to survive. One day, without
being asked, Raudhatul suddenly said that although she couldn’t recall her life
before the tsunami, she did remember coming to the Banyak Islands with an old
woman. “Arif was there, but only for a few days”
At
last reports, Arif had adjusted to his new life. So has Raudhatul. Their lives
are stable now. They are, by all reports, well-loved and happier than they have
ever been. Arif had transformed from a feral, chain-smoking, unbathed kid into
a new person. He is still reluctant to meet newcomers and occasionally his
behavior is erratic and disruptive, but he is also said to have a great capacity
for fun. Like teenage boys across the world, he worries about his looks and asks
his mother for advice on what to wear to look his best. Raudhatul, who suffered a far less awful experience,
is said to be a well-adjusted, outgoing and happy child.
Unless
a DNA test is done, and it will more than likely never be done, the world will
never know for certain if the two
children returned to the Rangkuti family are really Raudhatul and Arif. But the
question is, does it really matter?
