Flex Mentallo

The Guaraní Kaiwoá people, especially, are in permanent conflict with large landholders over land ownership; their leaders and young people have been murdered, the suicide rate is up among teenagers, and they are plagued by alcoholism and hunger.

As noted earlier, there are still isolated Amazon tribes that have never had contact with the outside world.

Most of the native population lives in the impenetrable Amazon jungle, where their ancestors were saved from genocide at the hands of colonisers, unlike the indigenous people of Brazil’s southeastern coast.

Brazilian indigenous people have the same health, education and human rights problems, and are as socially and economically marginalised, as native peoples elsewhere in the world.

While indigenous peoples make up around 370 million of the world’s population – roughly five percent – they constitute about one-third of its 900 million extremely poor rural people.

Poverty, malnutrition and infectious diseases conspire to shorten their lives, the report says.

According to a report commissioned by the U.N. on the “Situation of the World’s Indigenous Peoples” indigenous people have a lifespan up to 20 years shorter, on average, than non-native people in their countries.

Bitter fruit We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know. W. H. Auden

And when I visit the three households in that compound, I am surrounded by family. Next: Lost Cities

And years later, because of this, I met his niece Lucina, and her story changed for the better as I've earlier described.

So I chose a different path to the one taken by Kenneth Good. Mridula married a local man, Ashraf, and moved into the compound owned by him and his two brothers.

But then, people are people, wherever you go, and certain aspects of human behavior are indelibly the same, as far as I have seen.

In the village, the way of life is such that one is constantly surrounded by love and family. It is not idyllic - malicious gossip is also constant.

But what I have never been able to get past is the abiding certainty that the language and cultural barriers, the isolation, the distance from home and family, would bring suffering to a lonely young bride.

In 1985 I spent three month visting Bonhooghly. I spent much of my time moving around the village, helping Nirmal in his teaching. I was frequently asked if I was married. On one occasion, a local widow invited Nirmal and I for supper, and introduced me to her three teen-age daughters. "Which one would you like to marry?" she asked. Nirmal provided no guidance whatsoever. A marriage to a Westerner - virtually any Westerner - was considered a great catch. The bride would live abroad, and with luck the rest of the family would be allowed to follow. Marriages in India are rarely "love matches". They are business transactions - arrangements between families. Bride and groom have little say. (Had I not had the opportunity many years later to intervene and help Lucina on her extraordinary journey, she would never have completed her education and instead would have been married off some years ago to a boy from a family in Singapore.) I was 33 in 1985, perhaps twice their age, but it was difficult to judge. Village girls mature physically at a slower rate than in the West. Nor was this the only occasion on which I had to politely decline such an offer. I had formed a close friendship with a man named Ashraf and his family for instance. At the time his wife was dying of cancer, and I guess my visits helped. I taught English to his daughter Mridula, who I had known since my first visit in February 1982. She would have been about 17 in 1985. On a later visit in 1987, Ashraf impulsively said, "You marry her! take her back to England with you!" Even now, in my early 60s, enthusiastic discussions regularly take place regarding my marital status.

Kenneth Good's marriage to the young Yarima divides opinion. In the documentary film Secrets of the Tribe, Good's former teacher Napoleon Chagnon accused him of exploitation and even "paedophilia". Other anthropologists are less categorical. "By Yanomami standards it was not an unethical thing," said Terence Turner, from Cornell University in an interview for the same film. "But the fact remains that Ken Good is not a Yanomami and by… the standards of his own society he was marrying a girl who was not of an age to make a decision for herself." "Where do you draw the line - if there is one?" Good asks, in the documentary film Secrets of the Tribe. "Seeing as I have lived with them so long, that line fades away - there is no line." Age is unknown amongst the Yanomami since they have no counting system (they only have words for "one", "two" and "many"). So in his memoir, Good is not specific about Yarima's age when they first had sex - he wrote that she was "about 15". Yarima would have married another man if he had backed out of the betrothal. She had had her first period and so, in Yanomami culture, was of an age to settle with a husband and have a family. "We're always trying to judge from our own perspective - an ethnocentric view," says David Good. "You have to keep in mind our ancestors didn't have to go through the maturation of adolescence that we have to go through in the modern world. Girls became married and started having children after their first period. "And I always tell people, my father married my mother, but my mother also married my father. You know, it was a mutual agreement between two people and it's not like he snatched her away. This was a marriage based on love and romance and friendship."

Yarima was devastated. It seems she really had believed David would settle in the village forever. "I told her, 'I'll be back'. Unfortunately, it's been two years and a lot longer than I wanted it to be," he says. He wants his organisation, called The Good Project, to help indigenous people find their way in the market economy, a process he sees as inevitable. He says that those who live in more Westernised villages near missions can struggle with their identity, just like he did. "Today there are Yanomami who are becoming criollos - who are becoming Venezuelan. But just because they learn Spanish and are wearing clothes, they are no less Yanomami. Who am I? Am I Yanomami or am I nabuh? The Yanomami see me as a nabuh and the nabuh see me as Yanomami. I get caught in the middle. The person I am today is completely different from the person I was five years ago. I am now proud to be a Yanomami-American, I'm proud of my heritage. I love my mother and I look forward to being with her again and studying Yanomami ways. I want to create this bridge of friendship between the Yanomami and this world of the United States - and I want to bring to it the perspective of someone who is a family member. I am not an anthropologist, I'm not a politician, I'm not a missionary. I'm a brother and a son."

"She said, 'This is your wife and this is your wife. You're going to have children with them.'" David spent three months in the Amazon, but he travelled around, making four separate visits to his mother. Yarima couldn't understand why he kept coming and going. David didn't try to explain that he was in the process of establishing a non-profit organisation and was conducting research across the region. He knew when he left for the final time it would be hard. "When you untie the knot that hangs your hammock - in their eyes that's the ultimate symbolic gesture that you're leaving. And as soon as I untied that knot, there were tears all over. It just moved me so much."

"I had this realisation," says David, "I don't really care what happened. I don't care about the controversy. I don't care what all these critics think. I don't care why she left. None of that matters to me now - I can leave that for everyone else to speculate. All I'm looking forward to is developing a bright future with my mum and my family and my people." A video captured another emotional meeting, this time with his uncle (wrongly identified in the video as his grandfather). He had been headman while David's father had been in Hasupuweteri. "They're really quick to establish your place in the village," he says. "It wasn't like my father's situation where he had to spend years gaining their trust to be accepted." Soon after his meeting with his uncle, David's mother came up to him with two beautiful young girls.

After David had been waiting for about three hours, Yarima burst into the Hasupuweteri shapono. She had run all the way there. She was in her mid-40s, short, vigorous and strong. She had a basket around her head filled with roots she had gathered, which she threw to the ground while she tried to catch her breath. The village became hushed. It had been two decades, but David recognised his mother. "I knew it was her right away," he says. "I stood up and approached her. And then it just hit me - what do I do? Everything in me just wanted to hold her, to hug her, but that's not the Yanomami way of greeting people. So it was just this awkward encounter. I put my hand on her shoulder and she started trembling and crying. And I looked into her eyes and I just couldn't help but start crying myself." "There was a silence," says Hortensia Caballero, who had come upriver with David. "What I remember was a silence. It was a very beautiful, intense moment. Of course all the women in the village, including me, found we had tears on our cheeks." David started to speak softly in English. He said "I'm here, I'm finally here," and "I made it, I'm back" and "It's been so long". Then he was flooded with memories of his mother from childhood, which he relayed to Caballero to translate into Spanish, so that Jacinto, the local boatman, could put them into Yanomami. David did not ask his mother why she had left. Yarima asked if everyone was alive and well, but they did not discuss the past at all.

His father was remembered by the older Hasupuweteri, while the younger ones had grown up with stories of how Yarima and Kenneth's children had been raised in the world of the nabuh. His mother, they told him, was at the village of Irokaiteri, 10 minutes further up the river. But he would not be permitted to complete the journey by boat - he was altogether too interesting. Instead, he was taken to the village shapono. "Each family had its own hearth area in the circular dwelling but there were no walls and no privacy of any sort. Adults snored. Babies cried. "Some people talked... but not in whispers. "Someone might want to give a speech, one of the pata, the big men... It did not matter that most of them were asleep. He felt like talking, so he was going to talk." A young man called Mukashe was introduced to David as his half-brother. He ran off into the jungle to fetch their mother. After 19 years, David would have to wait a few more hours to meet his mother.

David travelled hundreds of kilometres by boat through the Amazon to reach his mother's village "I saw children and men and women on the riverbank just waiting for us to arrive. The women were all topless, the men had shirts and shorts on." They had come from the village of Hasupuweteri. As David disembarked they began speaking rapidly in the Yanomami language and prodding him. "I was just completely mobbed - all the women and the children gathered around me. I had so many hands all over me, pulling my ear, touching my nose, touching my hair," he recalls. At 5'5" (1.6m) David was used to being the smallest in a group, but he found himself nervously standing above the Yanomami, who are one of the world's shortest ethnic groups.

Two decades after she left, David, now 25, realised he had to find her. "I remember being with her - we used to have this little routine, where we'd stop by Dunkin' Donuts and get coffee and donuts," he says. He recalls her love of rollercoasters and how they would wrestle together. "I don't remember a sad or distressed mum, not at all," he says.

But it also captures her despondency.

Both Good and Yarima thought it would be a good idea to visit her home village once more, but they could not afford the trip on his salary as an assistant professor. Finally, in 1992, National Geographic agreed to finance the trip if they could make a documentary film out of it, to be called Yanomami Homecoming. The magazine sent three boats full of people and equipment to the Upper Orinoco, but not — as they had apparently promised — either a doctor or medical supplies for the Yanomami. The film contains some joyful moments of Yarima showing off her children to her sister and going crab hunting again in the creeks. A five year-old David is seen squabbling with Vanessa over a heavy bunch of plantains, while baby Daniel is carried on Yarima's back in a sling attached to a headband, in the traditional Yanomami style.