Joyful hugs end long nightmare for teen in Ecuador

It took many years for Sabrina to break free of her tortured past. In the last of a three-part series, JOHN ANDREWS tells how she finally came home.

Surrounded by photographs of family members at her new home in West Auckland, Leslie Ng never gave up wondering what had become of her little sister.

It had been 14 years since she had seen her.

At first Leslie thought Moapi "Sabrina" Tukufenoga had just wandered off.

But Sabrina had disappeared from Auckland in mid-1987 after taking up a sailor's invitation to join him on board a ship for a party.

She had ended up in South America where, she told the Herald, she was held captive in a dungeon cell for months before being helped to escape.

About 20 months after Sabrina disappeared, Leslie received a letter with a strange postmark that was to provide the first clue to what had happened to the teenager.

The letter was from Ecuador. It had come from a new friend of Sabrina's who wanted her family to know she was living in Daule, a city near Guayaquil, the country's biggest city.

Year after year, for more than a decade, Leslie would lean over her kitchen table and write to her sister, hoping she would write back.

Leslie told the Herald: "There had been no reply [to her letters]. I didn't know whether she was alive or dead. But I always thought she might come back one day."

In Ecuador, Sabrina had lived on the streets after escaping from her captors. Eventually, locals had helped her to rebuild a semblance of a life. She had friends, small jobs and accommodation. But she missed her family.

On her birthday last year, Sabrina worked up the courage to write to Leslie.

Her letter, some in English and some in her adopted Spanish tongue, as well as photographs of what she thought was her 25th birthday celebration, eventually arrived at Leslie's West Auckland home.

Sabrina wrote: "I want to come home. Help me, please." She told her sister she did not want to die in Ecuador.

A man known as "the Doctor", who had found Sabrina on the streets of Daule and helped her get back on her feet, told the Herald he believed she had some strong motivation for wanting to come home.

"She did not have a permanent job and she didn't have any documentation that would help her improve her situation," he said. "Sometimes she was hungry and she had a wish to progress but she was not able to."

In an emotionally charged phone call in the middle of last year, Leslie rang her long-lost sister at a phone number Sabrina had included in the letter.

Leslie asked Sabrina: "How do I know you are my sister? Your voice is different."

Sabrina recounted all the nicknames of their brothers and sisters.

"Ah," Leslie cried. "You are my sister."

When the sobbing stopped, Leslie briefly turned on Sabrina. "All these years I have been writing. Where were you?"

More tears flowed as Sabrina began to tell her story. Over the following months, the sisters talked about how they could get Sabrina home.

They understood, as did the Doctor, that Sabrina was an illegal immigrant with no passport or documentation of her arrival.

The last thing they wanted was for her to be arrested by border officials as she tried to leave the country. If she found herself locked up again in another South American cell, Sabrina doubted she could survive.

Leslie and her husband, Ben, helped Sabrina financially. They sent $15,000 to Daule, much of it earned by Leslie from sewing shoes at home.

Sabrina enjoyed true independence for the first time, renting an apartment and buying furniture including a bed, the first one she had ever owned.

With the Doctor and his wife, Sabrina began with the first step she would need to take before she could get home - obtaining a passport.

Her birth certificate had to be found. As a Niuean - she was born on the island in 1969, but moved to New Zealand at the age of 3 with her mother and five siblings - she was a New Zealand citizen.

John Kaulima, Niue's honorary consul in Auckland, took up the case after Leslie phoned him for help.

Kaulima then called Sabrina in Daule. "In broken English, she said she did not know how she got there," he said.

Aided by the Niue High Commission in Wellington, Leslie received Sabrina's birth certificate.

New Zealand Foreign Minister Phil Goff was told about Sabrina's plight in late June. He offered to help.

New Zealand's nearest diplomatic representative was in Santiago, Chile, so the ministry's consular division contacted the British consulate in Ecuador and asked it for help.

"It was a hugely unusual case but she was a New Zealand citizen and was entitled to whatever help we could give her to get home," said Goff.

"I think they [the British consular staff] handled it in a very professional, straight-forward way, notwithstanding the curious aspects of the case and the degree of risk that exists in a place like Ecuador, where things that we take for granted in terms of personal security can't be assumed.

"It was done discreetly and carefully and it worked as it should have."

A staff member at the British consulate in Guayaquil told the Herald they had helped her obtain her passport and make travel arrangements. But Sabrina had left an impression on them.

"Her story was quite tragic and sad for us and it was a relief, in a sense, that she could at last go back to her country," said the staff member, who did not want to be named.

"She told us she was kidnapped when she was little. She was kidnapped by someone who was travelling by ship. They had her locked in a room and she couldn't remember anything because she believed they had given her something that had made her lose her memory. Finally she escaped from her captors and she was lost."

Sabrina finally picked up her passport from the British consulate. It was stamped as though she was a tourist. She had to be out of Ecuador by July 26.

When the passport was handed to her, she wept and hugged the document to her chest.

Leslie and Ben sent Sabrina the US$2000 for airfares to New Zealand via the United States. On July 25, Sabrina checked in for Continental Airlines flight CO818 from Guayaquil to Houston, the first of three legs home.

The Doctor came with her to the airport to say goodbye.

"I was sad and happy at the same time," he said. "The help I gave her and the other people here was not enough. In New Zealand, she will be better off."

He waved as she walked towards the plane, posing as an English-speaking tourist so she would not draw the unwelcome attention of immigration officials wondering why she had been in Ecuador so long.

It worked. Sabrina left Ecuador unchallenged at 1.25am on July 25.

But still she met problems. An immigration official in Houston grilled her for details of how she came to be in Ecuador, causing her to miss her connection to Los Angeles.

Once she made it to Los Angeles, she boarded her flight to New Zealand.

She chatted to fellow passengers on the flight, but most of the time she spent thinking about what she had been through.

"Coming home I felt sad for the people I left behind and happiness because I was going to see my sister," said Sabrina. "Even now I can't believe it."

There was something else she was thinking about. Through her experiences Sabrina found it hard to trust people, even her own family. She worried that Leslie would not be at the airport to pick her up.

Her fears were compounded when she wandered through the arrival hall at Auckland just after 6am on July 27, election day.

Among the mass of people, she could not see her sister. Leslie, meanwhile, had seen a vaguely familiar face walk past but was not sure it was Sabrina.

She sent her 10-year-old son, Benjamin, to find out. Sabrina was heading towards the payphones when a little boy grabbed her hand.

"Aunty Sabrina?" he asked.

"Benjy?" Sabrina replied. It was the nephew she had never seen.

He led her to where his mother and father stood waiting. The two sisters stood hugging each other for half an hour crying.

Sabrina's ordeal in Ecuador was over.

Later Leslie showed her sister a heartfelt poem she had written last year but did not have the courage to send.

"My dearest, dearest little sister," it read. "You don't even know how long I waited for this day, how I've waited for so many painful and hurting years to hear from you or to see your pretty face again. It has been like I go to sleep and it's just a dream, but it was all real, it really happens."

Back in Guayaquil, the people who had adopted Sabrina hope she can recover from her ordeal. The Doctor's wife said she was happy to hear Sabrina was back with her family.

"When we first met her, she was in a very difficult situation and, as any other human being, we felt an obligation to help her.

"Now she is there we feel very happy that she is with her blood family, because the family she had here were just her friends. I am mainly concerned with her psychological situation. It was a hard time for her," the woman said.

"We only know maybe 60 per cent of her life. She keeps 30 per cent of her life from us. She needs some professional help [because] she has something hard in her heart and she needs to speak about that."

Sabrina has been checked by doctors since her return and has been given the medical all-clear. Now she hopes to find a counsellor.

To avoid recurring nightmares, she stays up late so that by the time she goes to bed she is very tired and will sleep. She also suffers from headaches.

In the month since her return, she has tried to recover old memories.

In an effort to help her remember, the Herald escorted Sabrina around the parts of Auckland with which she was once familiar.

She remembered the main entrance to Auckland Girls Grammar School in tree-lined Howe St, the tracks she used to get to school and the bus stops where she once waited.

At Parnell Primary she pointed to the spot under the large tree where she and Leslie used to sit.

Passing the Ferry Buildings downtown, she asked: "That clock has always been there, hasn't it?" She also recognised Queen Elizabeth Square and Aotea Square as familiar haunts.

Sitting in a Ponsonby cafe this week, Sabrina delicately picked through a plate of green salad. Shoulder-length dark hair, smooth, brown skin, and large brown eyes reveal her Polynesian roots. But when she starts to speak, her accent and words betray her South American links.

"This is pimiento, no?" she asks, holding up a slice of red pepper.

Sabrina is still relearning many parts of the English language she has forgotten.

Despite that, she finds it easy to express her desires. She wants to find a job and dreams of a house she can call her own.

Above all, she wants to make up for lost time.

- Additional reporting: Eugene Bingham

* andrewsj@ihug.co.nz