Woman Return After 18 Yrs in Cambodia Jungle

Jan 18, 2007 — HANOI (Reuters) - 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.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2803928

she got lazy & got used to forks!

i wonder how her body was "blackened"? smoke? dirt?

are usually much younger than this child, who, at age 8, was trusted to tend cows. I'm wondering if the child was perhaps developmentally delayed at age 8--and that getting lost and then just surviving made her forget much of what she had learned.

when there was actually still a place on this earth, where a person can disappear for 18 years without being dragged back, and forced to watch American Idol!?!??! arrghh! This poor woman should be returned to her native habitat.. and damn, I'd like to join her.