Knowing How to Survive

A short time ago we read the news of the crash of a plane in Colombia and that 4 children of the same family survived some 40 days in the rain forest of the Amazon. In the plane that crashed on 1 May 2023 there was, apart from the pilot and his assistant, a family of 5 persons: the mother and the four children. The plane took off from Araracuara in Colombia to go to San José del Guaviare, deep in the Amazon, and fell in the middle of the rain forest in the Amazon. In this accident the children's mother, the pilot and his assistant died. Of the four siblings, the eldest, Lesly, was 13 years old, Soleiny 9, Tien Noriel 5, and Cristin, the youngest, only 11 months, barely beginning to walk. When the plane crashed, the children stayed beside the accident. They ate a little flour bread they found in the plane and set out to look for a river to drink water. Before going away, they took from the plane a cloth, a torch, a few clothes and two telephones, which ran out of charge in very little time.

All the days they remained in the Amazon they ate certain fruits and roots of certain plants they considered edible. This family belonged to the Uitoto tribe, natives of the Amazon. The children knew the forest very well and knew very well what they should eat and what they should not eat. During these days when they were being searched for, the children stayed near a river, drinking water from a soda bottle they took from the plane. The greatest miracle was that they had no injury from the fall of the plane, although their mother lost her life four days after the accident.

Eliran Arazi, an anthropologist of the 'Hebrew University of Jerusalem' and of the 'School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences of Paris', who made studies on this event, says that the children of these tribes, even before entering primary school, accompany their parents in many activities such as walking in the forest, in agriculture, in fishing, in hunting, in collecting honey and in knowing the wild fruits of the forest. From the age when they are very small, they already know how to open a path in the forest, how to find water to drink; they learn to know the wild animals by their smells and the tracks the animals leave, such as jaguars and snakes, so as to be able to protect themselves. It seems that the belief the children had in the shamans of their people also helped them to survive without losing hope. With the tales the elders tell them, the children know very well how to adapt themselves in the relations between animals, plants and humans. This gives them the wisdom for the protection of nature, without causing any damage — something that city-dwellers do not accomplish and something that is in danger of disappearing. This wisdom was formed over thousands of years in these people who lived in these places.

Another miracle at which the world marvelled was the capacity of the elder sister Lesly, 13 years old, who knew how to take care of her little brothers and sisters, and above all of the smallest, Cristin, who was only 11 months old. When they were found, she was saying that she was already hearing the announcements that were being made through helicopters telling where they were. Indeed they put loudspeakers that made the voice heard in a radius of a kilometre and a half. Know that in these tribes the elder sister becomes the mother to take care of her younger siblings. Eliran Arazi says it is a duty to preserve this knowledge, which has great value and gives life to miracles. We cannot allow ourselves to see it disappear.