MERIDIAN — She went to Egypt with ambitions of seeing the Red Sea’s coral reefs. But soon, she found herself needing her own Moses to rescue her from captivity. Such was the plight of Meridian de Weerd family’s eldest daughter — called Hanna in the new book, “When We Could Not See the Moon.
” She had set off in February 2021 for a planned year in the North African nation. A digital nomad, she could (and did) complete her work in marketing and web analytics with a WiFi connection from anywhere in the world. Having visited Egypt before with a former boyfriend who was from the country, she yearned to go back for a longer stay, when she could scuba dive in the Red Sea and visit its endangered coral reefs.
This time, though, she didn’t even make it past customs, due to some vitamins and pancake mix. “She had a year to a year-and-a-half’s supply of supplements. When you travel, you put your supplements in baggies, and that’s what we did here at home before she first went,” said Tammy de Weerd, Hanna’s mother and Meridian’s mayor from 2004-2020.
“The number of capsules she had in her suitcase caught their attention, in addition to the pancake mix. It was all out of her view, so she didn’t know what was going on. She thought she was the lucky winner of the random draw for a random search.
” Instead, Hanna was detained on suspicion of drug trafficking. What followed was a lengthy ordeal for the de Weerds to prove Hanna’s innocence and get her released f.