By Dean Yates
I wonder if Adnan Ibrahim ever found his son or Munawar Jamaluddin ever located his daughter. As much as I hope they did, I doubt it. Both men were part of the drama that unfolded in Indonesia’s Aceh province on Dec. 26, 2004, when a 9.15 magnitude earthquake triggered a massive tsunami that killed 226,000 people in a dozen countries. In Aceh, where a succession of waves surged inland for up to several kilometres, the death toll alone was 166,000.
I met Adnan, 62, a week after the tsunami. He was scouring a refugee camp in the provincial capital Banda Aceh for information about his son, Syawaluddin, 17. As he broke into sobs, Adnan kept talking about how well his son was doing at school.
“The boy is very smart. He is good with computers,” he said.
Six months later, I went back to Aceh to report on how people were coping. Looking through Aceh’s main newspaper, my colleague Beawiharta, a Reuters photographer, saw notices placed by parents still seeking information about their missing children. We telephoned one of the parents, Munawar Jamaluddin, to see if he would talk about his search for his daughter. He invited us to his home, where he told his heartbreaking story.
Click here to read the full article: Memories of the Aceh tsunami never fade
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