The photograph in the Facebook group that ended a mother's search

A niece posted an old passport picture in a community group in La Fortuna de San Carlos, and neighbours recognised the face. Within weeks, Ana Isabel Villalobos, 80, stood in front of the son who had vanished twenty-four years earlier. He had been living roughly 130 kilometres from the place he disappeared.

Minor Villalobos Hernández was 35 when he walked away from La Uruca, San José, in July 2002. He had just buried his brother Alberto, killed in an accident in Orosi, Cartago. He did not come back. For the years that followed he lived without a fixed address — about eight of them in and around La Fortuna de San Carlos, in the shadow of the Arenal volcano, struggling with addiction.

His mother searched the way a believer searches. She went to Rome, to Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, the Holy Land. She visited the Cristo Negro de Alajuelita. At the end of July this year she travelled to the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles in Cartago. Two weeks later she was in San Carlos, looking at her son.

What actually found him was smaller and closer to home. In March, ADIFORT — the community development association that has run La Fortuna's public life since 1969, funded largely by admission fees at the Río Fortuna waterfall — took up his case. He was taken in by Casa de Refugio Emmanuel in El Tanque, a donations-only residence for men directed by Umeky Abarca, where the social worker Carol Peñaranda worked with him. Meanwhile his niece, Amalia Pérez, put a faded passport-style photo into a La Fortuna community group on Facebook. Neighbours knew the face. Someone passed the name to ADIFORT. ADIFORT knew exactly where he was.

Two weeks after his mother came, another visitor arrived. His daughter Verónica, 37, travelled from Puriscal with a life he had missed entirely — four children of her own. She had been thirteen when he disappeared.

Asked afterwards how he felt, Minor did not reach for anything solemn.

Nothing in this story was institutional. A shelter that takes no state money, an association built by volcano refugees and Peace Corps volunteers in 1969, a photograph shared among 20,000 neighbours who bothered to look twice at a face. Ana Isabel Villalobos crossed continents looking for her son. In the end, someone in the next village recognised him.

Today I feel so happy, I feel like Bill Gates is a pauper by comparison.