Twenty-five years ago, Jaeyaena Beuraheng, a Malay woman living in southern Thailand, stepped onto the wrong bus and then another wrong bus, and finally ended up more than 1,000 miles north (she thought she was headed south) apparently unable to get home. Beuraheng, now 76, does not speak, read, or write Thai, and survived as a beggar in the city of Chiang Mai. In 1987, she was arrested and has been in a center for the homeless every since until this week when she was reunited with her family. From Reuters:
She 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," centre director Jintana Satjang told Reuters.The woman had been known as "Mrs. Mon" because centre staff thought her mutterings sounded like Mon, a tribal language in neighbouring Myanmar, she added.
