An older woman, believed to have been begging on the streets of Bangladesh for survival for years, has reconnected with her family in India through the efforts of the West Bengal Radio Club, an organisation with a specialty in missing-persons cases.

The woman’s disappearance was traced to a religious pilgrimage she made nearly 20 years ago - an annual gathering near the Ganges River. With the volume of pilgrims at the event, known as the Gangasagar Mela, it is not uncommon for many attendees to get lost or to go missing. According to the club’s secretary, Ambarish Nag Biswas, VU2JFA, the woman, who is now about 70 years of age and from a village in India, somehow joined a group of pilgrims from Bangladesh. That is how she is believed to have taken a detour to Bangladesh instead of returning home.

News accounts said that she was soon living on the street, begging. Recently, ham radio contacts in Bangladesh reached out to the West Bengal hams asking them to intervene after they questioned her and she uttered one of the few words she could: “Sagar,” the name of the district she came from in India. Using photographs of her and their wide network of contacts, the West Bengal hams finally reached her surviving family members, according to a report in the Australia India News. She has two surviving sons in Delhi. Her husband and one son have since died. Attempts at uniting her with her sons were under way as Newsline went to production.