Jaeyaena Beuraheng

Jaeyaena Beuraheng (born 1931) is a Thai Malay or Yawi woman who made international headlines in early 2007 when she was reunited with her children and friends, having disappeared and eventually thought dead after an absence of 25 years following an intended shopping trip in her native province of Narathiwat during which she boarded wrong buses first in nearby Malaysia and then in Bangkok, Thailand which instead took her to Chiang Mai, at the opposite side of the country. Only being able to speak the language of her small minority, unable to read or write, and having been transported a total of 1900 kilometers (1180 miles) from home into an unfamiliar environment, she subsequently found herself unable to communicate with anyone and resorted to a life as a street beggar for 5 years, until she was arrested by local authorities during a public initiative and sent to live in a centre for the homeless in Phitsanulok. Her eight children eventually stopped looking for her after having been told at one point during their search that she had been run over by a train in Yala. She remained at the centre for the next 20 years, until three medical students in an exchange program arrived and identified her to the other employees as Yawi based on a song she had often been heard singing to herself but which no one understood. (Some news sources nevertheless reported that she had been thought to be MUTE.) She was referred to at the center as "Auntie Mon", because employees thought her language sounded similar to that of the Mon or possibly Shan people from the Thai-Burmese border. She now lives with her children in the remote village of Dusongyo. 1 2 3 4 5