With the help of her husband, Septi Rangkuti, she piled her three children on to a motorbike and its sidecar and sped away. But there was no time: a lava-like surge of water and debris slammed into the family's vehicle and dragged them into its swell.
Zahri, the couple's eldest son, made it out of the water unscathed but the parents were separated from their other two children, a 4-year-old girl called Raudhatul, and Arif, a 7-year-old boy. When the waters receded they were dragged out to sea clinging to a wooden door.
Tears form in the eyes of Septi Rangkuti as he recalls watching the pair disappear. "Suddenly we were pulled apart."
Unforgettable though it was, the Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed about 275,000 people including 170,000 Indonesians, was just the first chapter in a decade-long saga. For just a few months ago, their two missing children, long presumed dead, were found alive.
Raudhatul and Arif had escaped the tsunami's destruction, it was claimed, having been swept south towards a tropical island and then plucked from the water by a fisherman who took them in. "God gave us a miracle," Jamaliah told reporters after being reunited with the two children she claimed as hers.
In mid-November, those children were brought to Paringgonan Julu, the isolated jungle village to which Jamaliah and her husband moved after the catastrophe. "I always believed she was still alive," Jamaliah says of her daughter, who is now 14.
Meulaboh, on the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, was the closest habitation to the earthquake's epicentre and when a wall of water surged over a kilometre inland the fishing town was pulverised.
Ten per cent of the city's 70,000 residents had died.
For six weeks, Jamaliah and her husband made daily pilgrimages to the city's hospital, where the bloated and disfigured corpses of men, women and children lay on the floor of an improvised mortuary. Yet there was no sign of either child. They abandoned their hospital visits and, in February 2005, returned to the rural village where Septi Rangkuti had been raised.
In Paringgonan Julu, a 2000-strong community of rubber tappers hidden in the forests of North Sumatra, the family attempted to start afresh. They built a home, with donations from sympathetic locals, and began rebuilding their careers as a seamstress and an electrician.
Then, in June this year, came a call that turned the family's world upside down once again. Jamaliah's brother claimed he had spotted their daughter Raudhatul in a coffee shop in the town of Blangpidie, 130km southeast of Meulaboh. Within days the couple had caught a bus heading north in the hope of meeting their long-lost daughter.
When she finally came face to face with the girl she believed was her daughter, Jamaliah was speechless. "What could I say? I just cried and embraced her."
While Raudhatul was initially shy and spoke little, she did impart one key piece of information, Jamaliah claims. Arif, her brother, had also survived. Raudhatul remembered coming ashore with him in the Banyaks, an archipelago of largely uninhabited islands nearly 255km south of their home. They had subsequently been separated - in late 2005 or early 2006.
Jamaliah launched an appeal for information about her son through the Indonesian media. Within weeks a call came in from the owner of an internet cafe in the city of Payakumbuh. A young boy, resembling Arif but known locally as Ucok, had been sleeping outside her shop, the woman said. When she showed him a photograph of Jamaliah, the boy replied: "That's my mother." Within days Jamaliah claimed him as her missing son.
The "miraculous" reunions have raised suspicions, prompting recent claims that Raudhatul may not be her daughter at all. "I have no idea why people are saying she is a tsunami victim," a woman who claims to have looked after the girl for several years was quoted as saying by Australian media.
Jamaliah dismisses such scepticism, suggesting doubts had only been raised after the family with whom Raudhatul had been living demanded financial compensation for having cared for the girl.
There is no need for a DNA test to prove Raudhatul and Arif are her biological children, she says. "I am 100 per cent sure." With the family now living hundreds of kilometres from any major cities and authorities apparently reluctant to intervene, that may be the end of the matter.
Harder to ignore will be the psychological, and in Arif's case physical, scars carried by two children who have been suddenly uprooted and transplanted into utterly new surroundings.
Ill at ease around strangers, Raudhatul hardly spoke.
For Arif, who hopes to join the army, adapting is also likely to be difficult. He claims to have been exploited by human traffickers who forced him to beg as part of a gang of street kids. His erratic behaviour - at times clingy, at times withdrawn - hints at years spent sleeping rough and what the boy vaguely describes as periods of physical abuse.
Asked if he was happy in his new surroundings, Arif smiles and nods but says little else.
Whatever the truth about the children's parentage, the six members of Jamaliah's household will mark the tsunami's 10-year anniversary with celebration and thanks.
Jamaliah's thoughts will turn to her brother and sister, Nursihah and Maulana, who also vanished when the tsunami hit. "They were never found," she said.
• 7.58am on Boxing Day 2004
• 9.1 earthquake unleashed tsunami
• 275,000 people killed
•170,000 Indonesians died
-Telegraph Group Ltd
