Tens of thousands of sympathetic Facebook users helped reunite a Philippine grandmother with her 78-year-old husband who went missing for two weeks, the family said on November 23. A black-and-white picture of a forlorn Aurelia Matias, 73, sitting on a street corner with a missing persons poster on her back, went viral after an amateur photographer posted it on the popular social networking site on Monday.
Police had failed to find Luis Matias, 78, who suffers from memory loss, after he walked out of his Manila home on November 11, but he was located within two days of the Facebook post, his daughter Norma Avancena said.
"We don't even know how to use Facebook, but it was such a big help to us and we thank the person who took my mother's picture and posted it," Avancena, 48, told AFP a day after her parents were reunited.
"My mother was overjoyed. She had almost lost hope that she would ever find him again."
The husband, a retired waiter, was found sitting atop a flower box less than half an hour's walk from home after a member of the public tipped off a radio station, one of many that latched onto the Facebook story. The post was shared nearly 61,000 times.
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