While the news media in America have obsessed over the Natalee Holloway case, there have been countless missing persons cases that have gone unnoticed and unheralded over the last year–including the heart-rending stories of thousands of men, women, and children who disappeared in the Indonesian tsunami disaster one year ago today. Reuters UK spotlights one example:

Yasrati’s 13-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son have been missing since the tsunami swept across her village in the Indonesian province of Aceh, yet she clings to the hope they somehow survived.

As mourners across the world gathered along ravaged Indian Ocean coastlines on Monday to remember some 230,000 people dead or missing in the tsunami, Yasrati, 38, placed an advertisement in a local paper in search of her missing children.

“In my heart, I still believe they are alive. They are still somewhere, I don’t know where but I can still feel it,” said Yasrati, one of nearly a dozen people who put photographs of their smiling children in the newspaper.

“This is my instinct as a mother.”

Yasrati will continue to believe that “until I find their bodies”.

Her’s was one of at least a dozen advertisements from parents seeking information on children missing in the tsunami.

Hope has given Yasrati and many others the courage to keep on going in Aceh since the killer waves churned across their communities and turned lives upside down.

Some sobbed openly, others fought back the tears, as they remembered loved ones at a seaside ceremony in Ulee Lheue on the outskirts of Banda Aceh, capital of the province that lies on the tip of northern Sumatra.

“I am sad, but we have to keep on living and doing things,” said Marnawati, a 39-year-old woman in a yellow Muslim head scarf who lost her husband and 5-year-old daughter.

“No matter how much you cry, the dead ones cannot return,” she said, holding a 3-year-old son in a sling at a ceremony to mark the first anniversary of the unprecedented tsunami…

Here’s a Tsunami Missing Persons blog/website. Here’s another. And here’s a Flickr missing persons montage, which highlights the search for baby Alex, among many others:

Keep them in your prayers.

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Stormtrack remembers.

World Wide Help is asking the online community to pitch in for Remembrance Week, marking the tsunami anniversary with activism and charity drives.

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