داستان انگلیسی نقشه ی گوگل به مردی کمک کرد تا خانه اش را پیدا کند

ACTIVE LISTENING MAIN STORY

GOOGLE EARTH HELPS MAN FIND HIS WAY HOME

Saroo was just five years old when he found himself living on the streets fighting to survive. He wasn’t an orphan. He was raised in a happy but humble home. His mother performed back breaking work carrying rocks to feed her family. Saroo had a younger sister and two older brothers that he looked up to. Saroo’s father left his family when Saroo was just three. Two years later, his brother Guddu was only 14, but he was the man of the house. He scavenged for food, looked for dropped coins in trains, did menial labor, begged and stole to help put food on the table. One day in 1987, Guddu told his brother he was traveling by train from their small suburb of Ganesh Talai to the town of Burhanpur to find work. Guddu said he was too small to work, but Saroo begged his brother to take him along.

When they arrived in the town 73 kilometers away, Saroo was exhausted. Guddu told him to lay down on a bench in the train station and rest. He told him to stay put. When Saroo awoke, he was all alone. Burhanpur was a town of 200,000 people which was a big city for the little Saroo. He knew no one, and he didn’t know what to do. He decided to look for Guddu in an empty train. Not finding his brother, he sat down inside the train and fell asleep again.

When he came to, he was inside the train as it barreled to a destination unknown. The doors were locked, and he could not escape. Each time the train stopped, he yelled out for help, but no one came. He had no food, no money and no way off the train. He cried and cried. Fifteen hours and 1,500 kilometers later, the train stopped in Calcutta.

When someone opened the door, he ran out into the train station. Once again, little Saroo knew no one, but this time he was in a true metropolis. It was a city of millions, and he didn’t even speak the local language.

He couldn’t read the signs and was at a loss for what to do. He asked strangers for help, but he couldn’t understand their Bengali language. They ignored him.

Saroo tried to find his way home by sneaking on trains at random, but they were local trains that went to the suburbs and always returned him back to Calcutta. For weeks he slept in the train station. He lived off of begging and scavenging food from the garbage. Saroo was up the creek without a paddle.

One day, he met a man in the train station who said he would help him. The man gave him a place to sleep and food. He told Saroo his friend would help him find his family. On the 3rd day, the man’s friend came and lied down in bed with Saroo. Saroo remembers the moment clearly. “All of a sudden, being close to him the way I was started to give me a sick kind of feeling… I just thought, this isn’t right.” He decided to make a run for it. He bolted out the door, and the two men chased after him. After 30 minutes, he hid in an alley as the men passed by continuing to look for him.

Next Saroo met a kind man who gave him shelter and took him to a police station. The police sent him to a home for criminal children and orphans. It was an awful place, but Saroo was not there long. After the staff failed to find his mother, he was adopted by Australians, Sue and John Brierley.

Sue and John were capable of having children of their own, but they felt strongly that there were enough people on this planet. They thought the right thing to do was to help a child that was suffering. When Saroo arrived, he only spoke a few words of English, but they showered him with love and attention.

Saroo picked up English quickly and was a popular kid. He adapted well to Australian culture and settled into a normal life going to school and sailing with his father. He never forgot his mother though. He said, “Even though I was with people I trusted, my new family, I still wanted to know how my family is: Will I ever see them again? Is my brother still alive? Can I see my mother’s face once again? I would go to sleep, and a picture of my mum would come in my head.”

Some years after graduating from university, Saroo felt a strong urge to find his roots. Using Google Earth, he pored over satellite images looking for any sign of his hometown.

Hours in front of the computer turned to days, which turned to months and then to years. India is a vast country with over a billion people, 67,000 kilometers of track and 10,000 train stations. To say it was like finding a needle in a haystack would be an understatement, but he was undeterred. He figured out how fast trains traveled and created a search radius based on the possible speed of the train and the time he remembers being aboard it.

It encompassed 962,300,000 square kilometers. He slowly began to narrow down his search radius by what he remembered about the weather. It wasn’t cold, so it couldn’t have been too far north. He remembers seeing the stars, so he knew he wasn’t from a big polluted city.

And he spoke Hindi, so this ruled out Bangladesh and Nepal. Centimeter by centimeter, kilometer by kilometer he painstakingly followed the train lines on the Google Earth maps for three years. He calculated that he spent 9 hours a day searching every day totaling 9,855 hours of his life. He was relentless, and one day he was rewarded. He saw a station and a water tower that matched his memory.

He then saw an overpass that also matched. He had found the Burhanpur station where he lost his brother 25 years before. From there, he followed landmark to landmark from memory directly to his house.

In February of 2012, Saroo traveled to India to reunite with his mother. He learned that she had lost two sons. His brother Guddu was hit by a train and died the same day that he was lost. She told him that she never gave up looking for him. She told a reporter, “I went to Hyderabad, Bombay, Ajmer, Bhopal and Delhi to find him,” “I had lost my eldest son. I was determined to find Sheru.” That was his real name. After living as Saroo for most of his life, he found out that he had been mispronouncing it. It was Sheru which means lion.

Saroo has written a book about his life called A Long Way Home which was turned into a blockbuster called Lion.

He said he wrote the book to help other adoptees. “It was a book for other people like myself, in the hope that they would be empowered and educated to know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”