Arts & Entertainment

Indonesian twins meet 24 years on thanks to TikTok

Jakarta, Nov 5 (efe-epa).- Two Indonesian twin sisters separated when they were two months old due to local superstitions and an episode of sectarian violence met again after 24 years thanks to a video on social network TikTok.

“At first I didn’t believe it. I thought it was a scam, someone who only looks similar to me,” Elis Treni Mustika, a young “influencer” with thousands of followers on social networks, told EFE whose adoptive family raised as a lone child.

The young woman, 24, and owner of an online makeup store, uploaded one of her usual videos that by chance was seen hundreds of kilometers away by a neighbor of her sister Trena.

The curious neighbor, having confused the sisters who finally met again last month, told Trena how funny her videos were on Tik Tok, to which she replied that she did not even have a profile on the social network.

“When we started talking (in October), she knew my parents’ names and even had a picture of my childhood. She knew I had lived in Ambon a long time ago. Then she sent me her Facebook profile and I saw we were very similar, especially when we were girls, ” Treni said.

Treni Mustika and her sister Trena were born in 1995 in the city of Ambon, capital of the central Moluccas Islands, into a family that had emigrated from West Java under a government program to encourage the area’s repopulation.

Due to a series of beliefs and the fear that both would get sick at the same time, a local elder recommended raising the twins separately and for years the parents regularly visited either’s foster parents.

In 1999, however, violence erupted between the Muslim and Christian communities settled in the Moluccas, which lasted more than four years and claimed the lives of at least 5,000 people and up to 700,000 residents were displaced.

The twins’ biological parents were forced to flee to their native West Java but were only able to locate Trena, while losing contact with Treni’s adoptive parents, who in turn moved to East Java.

From her home in Blitar, Treni, who changed her surname to Fitri Yana – like her host family and was unaware about her twin sister’s existence – documented her life and uploaded videos of herself to TikTok, where she had about 8,300 followers.

About 500 kilometers west, in the city of Tasikmalaya, Trena, turned housewife, was stunned after that neighbor told her about the images.

Surprised, Trena, who was trying to find her sister for two years, managed to contact Treni’s profile early last month.

Finally, on Oct. 22, and after more than two decades apart, the sisters met again and merged in an emotional hug their biological father witnessed.

After the reunion, Trena and Treni, who continue to document their day-to-day lives in videos posted on social networks, have caught up on their lives and together visited the grave of their biological mother, who passed away two years ago. EFE-EPA

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