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Talking about taking the wrong bus!
Wednesday, 7 February 2007 11:22 am
This caught my eye in SCMP today. A lady took a wrong bus and ended up separated from home and family for 25 years!
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Woman comes home - after catching bus 25 years ago
REUTERS in Bangkok
A 76-year-old woman from southern Thailand who got on the wrong bus 25 years ago and ended up living at the other end of the country has been reunited with her family.
Unable to speak, read or write Thai, Jaeyaena Beuraheng boarded a bus in Malaysia thinking it was bound for Narathiwat, one of three Muslim-majority provinces in Buddhist Thailand’s far south, where most people speak Malay.
Instead, she ended up 1,200km to the north in Bangkok.
Her predicament grew worse when she boarded a bus she thought was heading south only to end up in Chiang Mai, a further 700km to the north, the Nation newspaper reported.
She eked out a living as a beggar for five years before being arrested in 1987 and put into a centre for homeless people in a nearby province, where she has remained ever since.
The woman was finally reunited with her eight children - who were told she had been run over by a train - after three students from Narathiwat came to work at the centre and spoke to her.
“It was only when the students in Muslim clothes visited her and she started chatting to them that we realised she wasn’t mute and could actually talk,” centre director Jintana Satjang said.
The woman had been known as “Mrs Mon” because centre staff thought her mutterings sounded like Mon, a tribal language in neighbouring Myanmar.
(courtesy of SCMP)