Woman returns after 18 years in jungle
HANOI - A woman has been returned to her home in Vietnam's Central Highlands 18 years after she went missing as an eight-year old girl tending cows near the Cambodian border, her father told a newspaper on Thursday.
Policeman Ksor Lu long believed that his daughter had been eaten by a wild animal until last Saturday when he was told that loggers had found "a forestman" at a village in Cambodia's province of Ratanakiri.
Lu arrived and "recognized his daughter from the first sighting" even though her body was blackened and she had long hair down to her legs and could not speak, according to the account in the Vietnam Rural Today newspaper.
Lu said his daughter, Ro Cham H'pnhieng of the Jrai ethnic minority group, probably spent most of the time in the jungle in Cambodia since she went missing in 1989.
The loggers told Lu that they caught her after realizing that someone had sneaked up and taken their lunch.
Lu said that at first it was difficult bringing her back to normal life because she resisted showering, wearing clothes or using chopsticks, fending him off and shouting and crying.
Four days later she started cooperating, Lu said.
"It is not easy indeed but life is waiting ahead for her,"
Reuters - January 18, 2007.
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