My mother was naked in the jungle and ate tarantulas, how could I explain that to the children who asked me about her, I did not want my schoolmates and the neighbors to know that, nor did I want them to know that I was a mestizo. All this belongs to the experiences of the young David Good, son of the American Anthropologist Kenneth Good and the indigenous Yanomami Yarima, his father arrived in the Amazon in the Venezuelan jungle in 1975, at that time he was a student of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania , who wanted to deepen research on behaviors and customs of the tribe, observed their rituals, accompanied them on their walks, in their hunts and learned their language, also realized that they were not a bloodthirsty tribe as they had said, they liked it so much which was for 15 months and he stayed 12 years.
One day the head of the tribe approached him and told him that since he had been living with them for three years it was time for him to take a wife, it is not good to be alone he said he takes Yarima as his wife, who was the sister of the head of the tribe, but it was a girl who was 12 years old and on 36 he did not want to consummate the marriage and decided to wait for her to be 15 years old. In that lapse of time was born a real love between the two with their different ways of seeing life however Kenneth was not doing so well in the hunt and he needed some things and foods from the city, besides that he no longer had economic resources for their investigations and had to return to his country taking with him to Yarima.
But for Yarima it was not easy to adapt to modern life, starting because he did not understand the language and except Kenneth could not talk to anyone else, his first reactions to cars, motorcycles and planes were scary even when he finally got used to it, even in the hotel he was scared to see his image in a mirror since he had never seen, but all this is natural there in the jungle there is no electricity, nor all these elements that for us are everyday we would be scared to see and hear to the animals of the jungle and before some tribal customs. All this could be read by David in a book written by his father and in which his experiences in the jungle are told in greater detail and how to carry out an investigation on the Yanomami tribe and build a family.
In the month of October of 1986 they took a plane to New York a week later they were married in Delaware and nine days later David was born his eldest son in Philadelfia, his sister Vanessa was born a year later in a visit to the Yanomami community in full jungle, three years later Daniel was born. But Yarima spent the time locked up at home with the children yearning for their jungle even when they visited from time to time, she could never adapt to her new life and on one of those trips she told her husband that she would not return to New York and The one with the broken heart but understanding its reasons I accept to leave it, she stayed with Daniel his youngest son, but then Kenneth went to look for it and it took it of return to house.
So two decades passed and in 2011 David felt that he should look for her, to reconcile with that mother who had abandoned him and who grew up hating, but thanks to the book that his father wrote he began to understand why he had left. When he finally saw her, he did not know how to greet her, but when they looked at each other they began to cry and in that moment he understood that he only cared to be with her and wanted to experience what it felt like to live in the jungle but he could only endure three months, experiment and He understood how his mother had felt living in a strange place.
But the farewell that was very emotional promised to return now he was proud of his Yanomami heritage and would not deny his origin, currently David has an organization called The Good Project that seeks to help indigenous communities. I hope you have enjoyed this beautiful story of family love, that regardless of the differences we have the family is above all.
Data collected from BBC of London and RT of Russia.