How crazy is this.
[SIZE="5"]Leaving the Wild, and Rather Liking the Change [/SIZE]
By JUAN FORERO
Published: May 11, 2006
SAN JOSà DEL GUAVIARE, Colombia â Since time immemorial the Nukak-Makú have lived a Stone Age life, roaming across hundreds of miles of isolated and pristine Amazon jungle, killing monkeys with blowguns and scouring the forest floor for berries.
A group of Nukak-Makú hunter-gatherers is encamped outside San José del Guaviare, Colombia, in a clearing where they receive aid.
A Nukak man hunting for monkeys outside San José, using a blowgun and darts tipped with curare.
But recently, and rather mysteriously, a group of nearly 80 wandered out of the wilderness, half-naked, a gaggle of children and pet monkeys in tow, and declared themselves ready to join the modern world.
"We do not want to go back," explained one man, who uses the sole name Ma-be, and who arrived with the others at this outpost in southern Colombia in March. "We want to stay near town. We can plant our own food. In the meantime the town can help us."
While it is not known for sure why they left the jungle, what is abundantly clear is that the Nukak's experience as nomads and hunter-gatherers has left them wholly unprepared for the world they have just entered.
The Nukak have no concept of money, of property, of the role of government, or even of the existence of a country called Colombia. They ask whether the planes that fly overhead are moving on some sort of invisible road.
They have no government identification cards, making them nonentities to Colombia's bureaucracy.
"The Nukak don't know what they've gotten themselves into," said Dr. Javier Maldonado, 27, a physician who has been working with them.
When asked if the Nukak were concerned about the future, Belisario, the only one in the group who had been to the outside world before and spoke Spanish, seemed perplexed, less by the word than by the concept. "The future," he said, "what's that?" He serves as a interpreter for the others. One of perhaps a few dozen indigenous communities living in relative seclusion in the Amazon basin, the Nukak have, in dribs and drabs, gone beyond the borders of their jungle world only since 1988, just as the world has intermittently found them.
In 2003 dozens of Nukak left the wilderness and arrived at San José del Guaviare, saying Colombia's relentless civil war had encroached on their reserve and forced them to seek safety. Perhaps as many as 250 now live in settlements around the town, about as many as anthropologists suspect are still alive in the wilderness.
In recent years Nukak clans in the jungle have also had some contact with missionaries and with farmers and sedentary indigenous groups, who trade their crops for meat hunted by the Nukak, who picked up at least the notion of agriculture.
Though it is unclear how big the Nukak population once was, anthropologists believe that what little contact the Nukak have had with outsiders has most likely left them reduced by Western diseases, including influenza and the common cold, to which they have no natural defenses.
Janet Chernela, an anthropologist who has worked with the Nukak, said a study she had conducted showed that Nukak who abandon their nomadic lives and settle down, even temporarily, become susceptible to illnesses, including soil-transmitted diseases.
What little is known about this latest group is that it abandoned the Nukak National Park, which is nearly half the size of New Jersey, in the state of Guaviare. Belisario â who knows several of the towns outside the reserve, having been reared for part of his childhood by settlers who encroached on the jungle â led the way.
It was no easy journey, the Nukak told Dr. Maldonado, spanning nearly 200 miles from the eastern end of their reserve to this town, known locally as San José. They arrived in the central plaza malnourished and exhausted, as astonished by this world of low-slung jungle buildings, jeeps and paved roads as the townspeople here were astonished by them.
"When I've had some time to talk to them and asked where they came from, they just say 'the bush,' " said Xismena MartÃnez, who oversees aid to the Nukak for San José. "But that could mean anywhere."
The newly arrived Nukak do not provide much detail about why they left. They just say that "the Green Nukak," a possible reference to Marxist guerrillas, who wear camouflage, told them to leave.
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