Surprised that a 13 years old was able to take care of 3 small children in a jungle full of snakes and jaguars for 40 days. How was he able to keep the toddler alive? What do you feed someone that young in a jungle??
It looks like it's a place where plants fruit all year round, plus the BBC article said that they are members of a local indigenous group and might have known what was edible.
Also the rescue mission and the air force was leaving humanitarian packs here and there with food and essentials, but am not sure if they found anything of that while they were lost
> She said the eldest of the four siblings was used to looking after the other three when their mother was at work, and that this helped them survive in the jungle.
> "She gave them flour and cassava bread, any fruit in the bush, they know what they must consume," Ms Valencia said in footage obtained by EVN.
> Surprised that a 13 years old was able to take care of 3 small children in a jungle full of snakes and jaguars for 40 days
FTA: "The children belong to the Huitoto indigenous group."
I.e. they're used to living on the land. Snakes are a concern if you're unwary in the jungle, but if you are somewhat aware of your surroundings you'll be OK. Jaguars are probably a different story, but I guess luckily they weren't in the territory of any animals.
Well Jaguars are very limited in numbers. So of falling risk to be eaten by
one of them is low. If it would be high, then there are to many and hence they would decline due to lack of food soon. Plus human is not in their hunting scheme and rather offsetting smell.
Big difference between a 30 year old westerner who’s never been more than 500m from a paved highway and is afraid of spiders and a 13-year-old indigenous child who grew up in the jungle
Definitely not a normal 13 year old. Taking care of a 1 year old in ideal conditions is already a challenge (even for an adult!), but doing so in the Amazon for over a month is a different ballgame. Also, the older siblings’ mental state must have been all over the place.
What do you mean by normal? Having an adolescence centered around indulgence and freedom from responsibility was not the norm anywhere, historically, and is not the norm in many places today. Waiting until adulthood to learn practical skills (whatever those might be) is a little weird, if you think about it.
“Normal” as in, if you take a random 13 year old off the street and throw them into the Amazon with their younger siblings, they wouldn’t be able to keep a 1 year old alive for a month.
I’m not talking about history. I’m talking about the current state of the world.
Current state of whose world? At 13 many of us had been intimately involved in raising infants and toddlers for years. It's not surprising that the 13-year-old in question is a girl.
She was able to do it in the Amazon because that's an environment she knows. Many, many others may not be able to do it in the Amazon specifically, but would be able to do so in a wilderness that they know.
I mean, right now what I'm reading from you is that all the teenagers today who could in fact keep an infant sibling alive in a wilderness environment they're familiar with are not part of reality, which is probably not your intention. So there's room enough for more clarity
I think the reason for this being the age of most Shonen main characters is a bit more pragmatic than that - it is simply around the age of the target audience.
P.S. No, I am not insinuating that shonen is strictly for middle schoolers, and that no one else could enjoy it. It is just the target audience for the genre, in general, is middle school boys. Like, even the name shonen itself translates literally to "boys' comics", and is officially listed as an editorial category targeting adolescent boys.
The repeated use of the phrase that children were "used by all sides" is concerning because there were many countries that used no children except those that got in by pretending to be older.
Iran systematically employed 12-16 year olds en masse for the purposes of clearing minefields and drawing Iraqi fire. Perhaps 50,000 Iranian children were sacrificed in this manner. Iraq regularly responded to these child-wave tactics by deploying mustard gas.
Just a few generations ago. If you were 14 in parts of europe during wwii theres a good chance you were in some army or a rag tag band of partisans. Probably a lot of 14 year olds took up arms against the US in wars since if I had to guess.
In English common law, traditionally 7 is the age of reason, 14 the age of an adult, and 21 the age of majority. We'd have 14 year olds off to sea, etc.
I suspect (but haven't checked) this comes from some biblical rules.
Remember that people can generally breed by 14 (even now, some girls go through pubity around 10 or 11), though a lot of western cultures now outlaw it.
They’ll put anything you want in their mouth, but they’re just as well masters in spitting it out. Feeding 1 year olds is fun though, I give you that :P
One thing I feel is missing from the article is how brutal the conditions (for the kids and the rescue team) must have been. Extreme heat and humidity are no joke.
I don't think that applies - actually they probably had close to ideal conditions for survival, it is possible to live naked without discomfort, and some tribes do.
In what we call "temperate" climates they might have died of exposure.
I don't know about extreme heat. I have been to Colombia and there are very different climates. I am not sure exactly where they were, but it is probable that the temperature there was more warm with lots of rain.
> The bodies of the three adults were found at the crash site by the army, but it appeared that the children had escaped the wreckage and wandered into the rainforest to find help.
PSA I’m no expert but as a kid I was taught to stay where you were if you got lost. And this seems to demonstrate that.
I was vaguely tracking this through Reddit for a while, and I thought the consensus was that they falsely claimed they found the children and it turned out to be a big political lie. Glad to hear it finally happened.
There's another article linked at the bottom of that article that talks about how the president had mistakenly claimed they'd been found a month ago, and had to retract it. Maybe that's what you're remembering.
"The president came under criticism last month when a tweet published on his account mistakenly announced that the children had been found.
He erased the tweet the next day saying that the information - which his office had been given by Colombia's child welfare agency - could not be confirmed." quote from the article this thread is about.
From reading this article, it sounded like they found the general area where they were, but it took a while to actually find them because they kept moving
As far as indigenous people are concerned,the jungle is a grocery store and a 13 year old would know what's in season an where to look for it. I don't think the kids had anything to hunt with; so, no meat.
