Lost in the Maze (2025) Movie Script
It's funny,
...because you're in the
middle of nowhere
and you have nothing.
You can scream all you
want. No one will hear you.
I remember one day we
were saying,
"What now? What are
we going to do?
We're trapped here in a dead
end, there's nowhere to go.
What are we gonna do?"
Then Miltino got philosophical.
"No, we must go down.
Let's fix this boat
and go down."
I said, "Miltino, I'm
not going down there.
Didn't you see what happened
downstream? Go down, really?"
When you get into something
like a rapid or a waterfall,
that's when you really die.
It's from here up. I'm going
up, I'm not going down.
The Indians, who were of
little support at that point,
they had stayed way up there.
It was no use screaming
or doing anything else.
No one could really hear
us. We were far below.
Bill, the
pilot, flew to the region
a few days after they
started the trip.
I don't remember which
runway it was,
but he wanted to go to the
region they were going up,
but fly over the region.
He flew over trying to
see if he could find them
or see them, and he didn't.
The
labyrinth is so big
that when you look down on
it, you look at everything.
You're looking
around everywhere.
You can't focus on just
one branch of the river,
so if you're not visible,
there's no fire or anything,
you'll not be seen.
That's what happened.
We were very frustrated.
I said, "Oh, there's a plane.
Ah."
There was nothing we could do.
We knew it
was a very difficult trip
because of the rapids.
There are almost 80 kilometers
of rapids. They don't stop.
We were going to start
with a small engine,
the 15 horsepower, which
was what we had.
The boat was very heavy
with four passengers
and everything we
needed to survive.
All the food, weapons, clothes,
bows, arrows, lots of
things, chainsaws, axes,
all the things we needed
for a trip like that.
You start to take stock
of your own life
in terms of who you really
are, your arrogance.
In our case, on that
very journey,
we knew the jungle because we
had lived there for 10 years.
Everything we knew that
had gone down the drain
and there was nothing left.
We had to sleep in the middle
of the jungle. We had nothing.
Now the problems begin.
A lot of people live like
that. You can't go up or down.
You don't have emotional and
physical strength anymore.
The situation is completely
out of the human perspective.
God works.
As life is fragile as it is,
like a mist,
like it is said in the Bible.
When you begin to think,
you're walking,
and you're bitten by a snake.
The snake injects just
a little bit of venom
in your huge body and
you're gone.
You walk down the street,
you're perfectly healthy.
You can fall and hit
your head and die.
I don't know
if it was because of the trauma
from that whole situation,
and I'm not even trying
to justify it,
because it was a
surprise for me too.
Instead of thinking about
surviving and getting out of it,
I start thinking about things,
and that gets very difficult.
I start thinking about
the family, parents.
No one will ever find
our bodies here.
How is a funeral without a body?
I've read my whole life.
I've always loved reading.
I read everything that
fell in front of me.
I read about the great
Chesterton expeditions.
I read "Tom Sawyer," "The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer."
When you read this book,
you will see that they
are lost on an island,
and come back to watch
their own funeral.
It is a very famous book
by Mark Twain.
Eh, it wasn't any fun.
It was no fun at all.
I kept thinking about how
my father, my brother,
Marcia, Tamoto, Tiana
would react at my funeral.
That was an unexpected
reaction for me.
I don't know
if Miltino got into a tailspin,
but he wondered a lot, he
thought a lot about death.
What is going to happen now?
I said, "Okay, Miltino, so what?
We might die and if we
die, we die. What can I do?
There's nothing we can do."
It was going to be a
funeral without a body,
but he kept thinking about it.
"What's it going to be like?"
"I don't know, Miltino.
What do I know about a
funeral without a body?
Let them worry about it."
Those years
we spent in the jungle,
I didn't worry at all
because Miltino had full
knowledge about that place.
He went out with the Indians,
fished,
piloted the outboard
motor very well.
He knew the forest. He
was very prepared.
I wholeheartedly trusted him.
Whether we needed a
lighter boat,
and he told me the whole
thing about it,
why they used that boat.
Everything was very
natural to me.
Until, if I'm not mistaken,
on Wednesday they called
me into the office
to tell me that the Indians
had arrived in Patamau.
That the boat had capsized,
bent, sunk or whatever.
I don't remember the story the
Indians told about the boat,
and that boat had
disappeared in the water,
and that they thought that
Curt and Miltino had died.
Then I asked, "Did you see
the bodies?" He said, "No."
After a while, one of them,
I don't remember which one,
came and said, "Do you
understand that they might be dead?"
I said, "I understand, but
nobody found the body, right?"
I came
here on an internship
and I liked it a lot.
On April 17th, 1980,
we came here.
I was 25. Marcia was 23.
We had already been
married for a year,
and we weren't worried about it
because it was something
that we were prepared for
through courses, internships,
we already knew what was
going to happen.
We were thrilled with
the new things.
Everything was so different.
First, a language that we
didn't understand at all.
The way people dressed,
the environment,
the sound of the forest,
the night,
everything was new for us,
like when you're in a
different country.
It all looked very
interesting. "What is that?"
I wanted to learn
whenever we heard a noise
during the conversations.
When people talked,
and they talked
and we understood absolutely
nothing, what they wanted.
And everything they said
seemed important.
"What did he say? What is this?"
Also, when it came to
what we were going to eat,
how to clean the curassow,
the wild turkey, iguana,
how to eat a paca belly,
clean a pig.
Things that logically we
had never done,
but we didn't have big
problems because it was a path.
Like I said before, I
reached my goal,
and I got to where I was able
because I had been preparing
myself for so many years.
I left so much behind to be
able to be where I was going.
I came home. This is
where I wanted to stay.
That was the beginning of
the story all these years.
There were many years
learning the language,
learning a lot about
the culture.
There were good years,
our children were born,
and we really missed those
years we spent in the jungle.
When I arrived, one of the
things that was very interesting
was that in those years,
contact with outsiders
was still very limited.
In an Indigenous society,
you have a kinship line
and that is very important.
When Marcia and I arrived,
we were adopted by a family.
I had a mother, I had brothers.
I still have brothers.
The woman said, "You
will be my son."
Yunia knew was her name.
She had several children.
They called me brother.
They treated me like a brother,
and they were always
there for me.
There was another lady
too who said,
"You are going to be my son."
I was a part of her family too.
I had two mothers, which
is typical in this culture,
because they have a family
system called extended family,
and there you can ask "How
many mothers you have?"
When you go
into an environment like this,
which is completely
different from yours,
you are the learner.
You're the one who has to
learn from them
because you don't
understand anything.
If they leave you in the
jungle, you get lost and die.
They own the truth of
the forest of everything.
They know from end-to-end
how things work in nature.
It's incredible, so you
have to go willing to learn,
never to teach.
But a
cross-cultural context like that
is very interesting.
For example, our children
grew up in that context,
so the experience they
have is sensational.
It's out of this world.
For them, wherever they
are, they are fine,
because they know how to live
in another much simpler context
in the middle of the forest
and they liked it.
Even today, when they come
here to visit us, they say,
"Dad, can I go to the jungle?"
From time to time, David comes
and performs dental work
in the village.
When Larissa comes,
she also says,
"Dad, can I go to the
jungle with you?
She already took one of
my grandsons,
and soon she will take
the other one too.
They have this
cross-cultural experience
that is very positive,
and many people don't have
that privilege.
There's people from SESAI
who provide healthcare.
In the past, only
missionaries carried out
all the treatments, vaccines,
et cetera.
Today, that's SESAI's job.
We are now focused on
the educational part.
We start to teach
them how to read
and write in their
native language.
We give them handouts,
everything in the Yanomami language.
Only later we give them
the transition booklet,
and they start to
learn Portuguese.
This is to emphasize
the appreciation of
their own language first.
They learn to read and write
in their own language as well.
The trip
was unfamiliar to us,
but as we already
knew the jungle,
I always say this, we knew
how to make camp using leaves.
We knew how to shoot, we
knew how to fish.
Eh, we knew all that. We
were with the native people.
We could make fire. We had
taken easy-to-prepare food.
We had honey, we had a
lot of things
for if it was a week
trip or a 10-day trip,
we wouldn't have a problem.
Our logistics were good.
It was supported by two
Indigenous people
who also knew everything,
and we had several years of
experience in the jungle.
We knew all the dangers
and all that stuff.
In the adventure aspect,
there was also an
aspect of ignorance.
Courage is very relative in
a case like this.
One of the things we
did not foresee
is we had a lot of
experience with wooden boats,
and the wooden boats which we
used before are much heavier,
but they are also
much more stable.
The aluminum boat is fast,
but it is not as stable.
It's very edgy.
So we
decided, I don't know how,
but let's get an aluminum boat.
At that time, 30,
almost 40 years ago,
it was very difficult.
It was very difficult
because here in Boa Vista,
there were no aluminum
boats to buy.
Today you can find any
type, size and color,
and we, we managed to get
a boat from Mojine Marine.
It came chartered,
arrived in Boa Vista,
but it wasn't the
proper boat either.
It had to be that boat they
called
because it stays higher on
the surface of the water.
The one we got was a cargo boat.
It carried more,
but settled more on the
water and was slower.
That's the one we bought,
and we bought the wrong
one that was riveted.
It wasn't even welded.
Because the ones that are
used today are welded,
and stronger, which
is much better.
The rivet one is much weaker.
Then when this boat
arrived here in Boa Vista,
we had no choice but to say,
"Now we have to take it
to the village.
How are we gonna take it, by
airplane? It's not gonna work.
We could perhaps get into
the Air Force's Buffalo
and take it all the way
up to Awarise,
but Awarise goes far beyond
the post from where we live.
Then we would have to
bring the boat back
with a lot of waterfalls
and everything.
We decided, "Ah, let's go
up the river."
We set everything up, all
the necessary material, fuel,
tools, food, and we take two
Indigenous people with us.
We prepared everything for our
trip, which would be a feat.
Right on the first day,
or didn't even take a day,
we started to sense what
we were going to face.
On the first, right on
the first day,
or it didn't even take a day,
we started to sense what
we were going to face.
Because it was a river
with a lot of rapids,
there were times when
we had to stop.
Two or three people had to
go down on top of a rock,
and then we had to go
through the other side
because the engine didn't
have enough power to pass.
I'm talking about rapids here.
Imagine when the rapids or the
waterfalls are huge. No way.
We already started to see
this trip is going to
be challenging.
We kept going, after all,
we were young at the time
with an adventurous spirit,
and so we were saying,
"Let's go."
It is not a straight river
or one that has curves,
but it gets wide, so
it is a very different
and very bumpy river.
We knew we were going to
face some challenges ahead.
There
was no other way.
We had to choose the smaller
branches of the river,
and we had no idea
where we were.
We didn't know because we always
opted for smaller branches
with fewer rapids or
weaker rapids
so we could keep going
up the river.
We did not know where we were,
whether we were too
far to the left,
to the right of the main branch,
if there was a main branch,
because that was the option.
We were going up.
And we kept going up without
knowing where we were,
but as we went up, we realized
that we had passed the
point of no return.
There was no way to go back.
As we went up and passed
waterfalls, some of them were big.
We had to take the boat out.
We knew we couldn't go
down any further,
because when you're
going up the river,
you can still
control the engine.
You can stop, you can
look where you're going,
you can go back, you
can even go in reverse.
We knew that the only way
now was to go forward,
and we were getting more scared
because the rapids didn't end.
We would pass one, and soon
after there was another,
and another and
another and another.
And sometimes taking
the boat out,
passing through the
woods, and we were scared,
because we couldn't give
up on the trip.
We had to keep going.
I remember
that when we arrived,
we initially worked
hard to learn
the language and the culture,
so we decided not to have
children for practically two years
so we could adapt
ourselves to the place
and learn the language
in the best possible way.
We were very careful to do
things as best as possible.
There are people who learn the
language faster than others,
but it's a very
complex language,
and it has many
onomatopoeic sounds,
and sometimes the sound
they make is even funny.
They come and take the
arrow and then
so cachow means that the
arrow really penetrated.
It has all these sounds.
I always say I'm going to
die learning this language
because there's a lot to learn.
It's no use to look it
up in the dictionary.
You have to create your
own dictionary.
It is complicated. It's no
use even going to Google.
I type there, what is this?
Google won't tell you anything
because it's a language
that hasn't been described
ipsis litteris yet.
Hello?
Hello?
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Oh.
It's beautiful.
They say, "Wow, Curt, you
speak Yanomami so well."
It's not that I speak well,
but the more you imitate,
the closer you get to them.
Even if you can't really
speak the language,
I try to imitate by
making little jokes.
They say, "Wow, this guy
is one of ours."
That's not true. I still
have a lot to learn.
Curt
is so generous.
Sometimes I tell him that
he doesn't suit himself.
I say, "But you don't
suit yourself"
because Curt is a very,
let me see how I can
define Curt.
Curt is a very god-fearing
man that doesn't have,
I mean he's a very,
he's a very intimate
relationship with God.
He prays a lot and I have to
learn more of that from him.
I am very much like I
pray when I'm walking,
when I'm driving, when I'm at
work, I pray a lot like that,
but he stops, prays until
early morning.
So before he goes to sleep
he puts his two pillows
on the floor and kneels.
He is this man of prayer,
this something that is a
rule in his life, understand.
I think that's what
sustains him.
So when I tell people that
he doesn't suit himself,
because he's very grumpy,
but he doesn't mean it.
He complains about everything,
and I say, stop ba.
He's a curmudgeon.
He was born a curmudgeon,
but he's very funny.
He's very happy.
That's why he doesn't
suit himself,
because he has this grumpy
side, and I think that,
I don't know why he just likes
to be against everything,
but he's very happy, he
is incredible,
and his love for the
Indigenous people too.
He is very happy. He is very
happy with his ministry.
He is very happy with his
family. He is a very happy guy.
I think that he is a little
too happy and silly sometimes,
I'm much more serious.
Curt ends up being very funny,
and it's too much for me,
because I'm much more serious,
but we get along very well.
There's a balance.
Hey.
They have
more knowledge than we do,
and we only have more knowledge
in areas like technology
and medicine which they
don't have access to,
and if you were on your own
you would die in a
place like that.
How did they survive all these
years living the way they do?
There is a similarity.
Of course we overvalue
technological knowledge,
but if you stop to think about
it, we can't even make a map.
Your personal knowledge
is based on the technology
that came through college,
companies, secrets,
but if you go back
to the basics,
you don't know how to make fire,
they do.
You;re living in a society
that has provided these things
through centuries of
trial and error.
But if that all ended and
you came back,
how would you make fire?
I had colleagues in the
village who allowed me to study
at least for a while,
and I enjoyed it a lot,
and I went out a lot,
and I liked to do that.
I did it with pleasure,
and it was like this.
Almost every Saturday,
I went out.
And by the time I went out
I regretted it bitterly,
because they go walking
through the woods all day.
Literally the whole day.
I was in excellent
physical shape,
but when you start walking,
you warm up.
You walk and walk and walk
and you don't see anything.
People think that going
into the woods,
it's like going to a
supermarket.
You pick something here,
something else there,
grab a banana, kill an animal,
and go back home with
the cart ready.
Many times you don't
see anything.
The people get hungry for meat.
They call it,
which means to get
hungry for meat.
They didn't find game.
I went out, sometimes
when I went out
they had found something.
Someone had heard the noise of
pigs or seen the footprints.
We would go with more certainty,
but I remember leaving early,
by 6 am I would be walking.
I would walk the whole day,
and come home at the
end of the day.
That part was interesting,
because when we stopped
we would talk,
and then I would learn
the language.
That part helped me a lot
too in my relationship
and the vocabulary for that
kind of walks, hunting.
To this day, we all know if I
find a feather on the ground,
I know from which bird it was.
I can get one or another wrong,
but I know a feather of a
toucan, a macaw,
a curassow, a jacu.
You learn these things.
What animal is singing,
what bird you're seeing.
Something very cool about
learning their language
is when you call an or locate the pigs,
they listen to the
noise the pig does.
They heard it from far
away, so they took it.
Stopped, and they always
took two types of arrows.
An arrowhead for a large
animal, which is like a knife,
so you can have an idea,
and an arrow for birds,
which is quite different.
They would leave the
arrows for birds,
and only take two or
three tipped arrows,
which is called roka.
Think of a knife, only it was
made of very strong bamboo,
and then we could go on
top of the pigs.
Then it got crazy.
There was a rush.
They would kill several of them.
It was far away. They
would disappear.
I would always stick
with one of them
and go after them
with a shotgun,
and usually kill one or
two or even more.
Then we stopped,
and they went back to
where the arrows were,
where they had left things.
I used to go crazy about it
because it's all the same.
You have no idea
how they have such a
sense of direction.
It still amazes me to this day.
These things seem so strange.
You'll see that behind all
that there's a common feeling,
and that's very interesting.
Look at it, any other
culture today,
no matter how non-Western
or how different it may be,
mm, you will see the same
human characteristics
that we all have.
Love for children,
scolding them.
When you look at it,
there is no difference,
no difference at all.
When you understand, you live
together, and you admire,
you really appreciate what
is common to all of us.
The joys, the pains,
the abundance of food,
a good hunt with a lot of pork,
a lot of joy that this brings.
The same thing if you go
to a Rodesio steakhouse,
it's just the same thing.
You understand this part,
and we already knew
this from the beginning,
but when you really process it,
for example, I
sometimes go to Cassia,
a hospital unit there,
and what does a guy feel?
He misses home. He wants
to go back, same thing.
I remember I was talking
to my brother-in-law Akobe,
and I was already speaking
the language well,
and I was looking for
word longing.
We think that longing
is something exclusive
to the Portuguese language,
or the Latin languages,
especially Portuguese.
It surely doesn't
exist in English.
You will say I miss you or
something else,
but the feeling is the same.
It's not that we feel more
because our word is better.
I was talking to Akobe,
I said I was looking for
the word longing.
"Let's see if they have it,"
I said.
Sometimes you think of
when you were little,
what your father was like.
I was saying a lot of things,
trying to find that word.
He listened and turned to
me and said the following,
"Funny white people
feel that too."
I couldn't find the word,
but he said the same
thing I was looking for.
He was astonished. And
you also think like that.
We use the word saudade,
and saudade really is a
spectacular word in our language.
Joy, sadness, feelings,
and many things common
to all peoples.
This is difficult to teach,
or for a surrounding
society to understand,
because there's
always this idea.
No, he is an Indian. He doesn't
understand or know anything.
He doesn't have anything.
He's worthless.
That is a very bad
understanding.
There are still many here in
Boa Vista who think like that.
They say, "They're just
occupying land,"
and then there's the
political line
that I won't even talk about.
There's gold digger invasions.
It's a horror what has
been happening today.
We continued for two more
days without major incidents,
but we were scared because
the rapids didn't end.
We were going up, I reckon
maybe 62 miles of just river.
What was the problem?
You passed a rapid, sailed
maybe five, 10 minutes.
Then you saw water in
front of you,
and it was a big discouragement.
You'd get there, see if
you could pass.
If not, we'd unload the boat,
pass everything by the side,
taking the boat out
and continuing.
As we
climbed operating that vine,
the boat docked and
started to return.
It came back and got a good
hold of that thick vine,
and it turned over with
the force of the water.
And it turned over, and
everything that was in the boat
went down, including us.
And Milton just said
to the Indians,
"Take the machete and jump."
One of them grabbed the machete
and they jumped onto the bank.
I saw Miltino down river going
down among the other things
that were floating,
other things had already gone
to the bottom of the river,
the boat capsized, and
then began to descend.
I also threw myself into
the water and went down.
In the middle of things,
we went deep down,
the Indians then stayed on top
and went straight to the bank.
When the boat
capsized, I entered the water
and I was pulled right
into the current,
and got out into a whirlpool.
The only thing I had
time to grab,
which is what was within
reach, were two oars.
I sank with these oars
because I got into a
whirlpool of water.
It pulled me down with
the two oars,
and they were cedar oars.
They float, they give
you a certain buoyancy.
I sank and I went very
deep. Everything went dark.
I just remember the
darkness, my ear hurting.
I don't know how deep I
was, and I was going down.
I can swim. I was in good
physical shape.
Despite being tired, but
there was nothing I could do.
Then begins the first
direct intervention of God
because I said a prayer.
In fact, it was a cry.
God saved me.
Immediately I went up
as if the whirlpool
started to do the opposite.
Instead of pulling me to
the surface of the water,
I was floating.
I saw Curt way down on
top of the boat,
and I swam toward Curt,
but everything has sunk.
We could see the boxes
floating away.
We had wooden boxes with food,
with matches, with a stove,
with everything we needed,
and it was sinking.
It's not scary drowning,
it's a very bad feeling, which
is what was happening to me.
When I said this prayer,
in fact, it was a cry,
a cry for help and I went up.
The time I went up, the
feeling was not just of relief,
it was having gone through
a trauma there.
The time that I sank,
it was more of a
physical reaction
than an emotional one of fear.
Now we are really lost.
Now our situation is
going to be very serious,
but you just keep
doing something.
We put the boat on the bank
and sat down for a while,
looked at the whole situation,
and it was very serious
because of our two traveling
companions stayed far up river,
and we put the boat there,
and we went up
to try and find them,
but we couldn't,
because there were so many
branches and so many islands
that we could not move
on to the next island,
and they couldn't get
down either.
And we stayed far away
thinking about that mile,
and that's conservative.
They tried to find us and
we tried to find them.
The boat
was really crumpled.
It looked like a U,
you couldn't even see
it was a boat anymore.
When we turned around, the
engine was still attached,
and it still had the gas tank.
The tank was still
attached to the hose,
so it was all providential
so that we wouldn't be
left with nothing.
There was no alternative
but to stay there,
there was nowhere to go
and we were very tired,
exhausted from that rapid
we went through.
We had no choice. We had
to stay there.
There was nowhere to go.
We had to fix the few
things we had.
Opened the bag I had,
opened everything.
Some things were wet.
Then I did a silly thing
and put these clothes on
top of a rock,
on the edge of the river to dry,
but during the night
the river rose so much
that in the next day there
weren't any clothes left,
everything was gone.
The little things I
had were gone.
Everything starts to come
into your mind.
What now? What's
going to happen?
Those thoughts are always, ah,
there.
Our family members, what
will they think?
How long are we
going to be here?
Will we ever get out of here?
What is God trying to
teach us with this?
Miltino thought about death.
He was very worried about
how his funeral would be
with no body.
I said, "Miltino,
forget about it.
There's a chance we might die."
It's a possibility, but I
kept thinking,
what is God's purpose in taking
our lives in that context?
What now? No food, no
material for survival.
Machete, if we had a machete
we could cut hearts
of palm to eat.
We looked for something to eat,
but the jungle was just
really scarce.
It wasn't fruit season
either. There was nothing.
We looked for some root.
There was nothing, so we
could only drink water.
Whenever we got hungry, we
filled our bellies with water,
but it didn't kill our hunger,
it just alleviated hunger.
We spent three days in
this routine.
We started to get really weak,
and I heard a noise
in the woods.
Chop, chop, chop. When I
looked, I saw an alligator.
It was this big.
I said to Miltino, "Miltino,
an alligator.
Let's catch this
alligator and eat it."
And then he said, "Okay."
I said, "I'll take the
front and you take the back.
You grab a stick, and
I'll take the front."
I said, "I'll take the
front and you take the back,
and you grab a stick
and I'll take the front,
and we'll mess with it
to distract it."
No sooner said than
done, bap, hit him hard.
Sure enough, that's
what happened.
I took the front, very
slowly feeling my way,
and he took the back.
The alligator stayed by
my side looking at me.
Then it raised its little head
like this and did.
When he did this,
Miltino came from
behind and hit it.
Bop, we killed it with a
stick. Then came the problem.
There was no fire, no knife.
How do you open a hard
skin like that?
I just remember that we
grabbed its tail
because the tail is all
full of stuff.
We break off that little piece.
Then we would have a few
pieces of meat.
We took it and ate it. We
couldn't kill the hunger.
We ended up not being
able to use the alligator
to satisfy our hunger.
We knew that death was
one of the possibilities,
because what were you gonna
do in the middle of the jungle
with nothing, without
fire, without a machete,
without being able to
do anything to survive.
We had nothing. It really
was a chaotic situation.
And we were facing death,
because we said,
humanly speaking,
there is no way out of here.
How are we going to get out
of here now, broken boat,
I don't know if it will be, if
it will work again, no food.
It's a matter of time,
I think, for us to die.
Our salvation is still
that we have the boat,
the broken boat.
The engine is still there.
There is some fuel
left in the tank,
and the best thing to do
is to dig into it
and try to find a way
to get it working again,
but then comes Miltino
and says, "it's no use.
There are no tools."
I've never seen
Miltino like that,
so close in these
difficult times,
because Miltino was a very
relaxed guy, nice to talk to,
but when the difficulties
came, he just got depressed.
You start
making an assessment
of your own life in relation
to who you really are,
your arrogance in Aike,
on that very trip
of 10 years of experience
living in the jungle,
everything that had gone
down the drain,
and there was nothing left.
You start thinking about many
of your own mistakes too.
It's hard to explain it, but
it's a suffering situation
and you make new resolutions.
That came from this
experience of human fragility
in relation to life, emotions,
feelings.
I've always been a person who
has a high pain threshold.
I always thought about
how I would react
in a situation like that.
I learned a lot from
that experience,
and it has been with me
since that time.
I may be in a situation right
now of great acknowledgement,
you know, some things like that
have happened occasionally,
but I say remember,
remember who you really are
that was in those days
of suffering.
A kind of depression. You
won't get out of here.
It is even in Curt's way.
The jungle,
especially the Amazon
jungle, for me is impressive.
It is exuberant. It
is fascinating.
It opens your eyes
because it is such an
immense thing, so diverse.
There are trees of all
types, size and color
with those vines and whatever.
You say, "Wow, what a
beautiful thing."
It has a big impact, but
apart from being
such a beautiful, exuberant,
and fantastic place,
it's a place that scares you.
It gives you a certain fear,
a dread,
because this very jungle
can also swallow you up,
and it's not just the
large animals like jaguars
and other animals, but
let's say mosquitoes,
ants, termites, snakes,
these smaller insects,
they can crush you.
It can make you fall
into such a depression
and you can even die
because of small insects,
and if you don't know how
to get out of that context,
the jungle will, you
know, swallow you alive.
For the Indigenous people,
it's easy.
The jungle is their home.
If you are with an
Indigenous person,
you are at home with him.
He takes a leaf, then
he weaves it,
and makes something to
carry things.
He goes there, takes the vine,
does something for this or that,
rips off some bark from
the trees and makes a net.
For him, it's the
backyard of his house,
but if you leave the trail for
a little bit, you get lost.
You look everywhere,
everything is the same.
Everything is green.
You only see the woods,
the trees,
and you get lost
without realizing,
and there's nowhere to run.
I sat down with Miltino,
we talked and I said,
"Miltino, do I think there's
a chance we might die?"
"Yes, it's one of those
possibilities,
but I believe that God has
a purpose for our lives,
and one of the purposes is
for him to work in our lives.
Let's stop here.
Let's sit down and talk
and let's clear
everything up with God.
There are many things here
that we do determinedly,
and God is completely out
of the picture."
That's it.
We're living on the
sidelines with no purpose.
We're doing things in the
name of the gospel of Jesus.
But Jesus is out of our
routine here of our day-to-day.
It is God trying to teach
us how to rely on him.
We were doing things
just for the sake of it
with God out of the way
thinking we were the ones.
Let's confess our sins.
With regard to our
colleagues at the Post
and everything that we
did, the steps we took too.
Let's ask for forgiveness.
What else can we do?
We were like, let me see,
if I can remember anything else
that I have to get
right with God
because I acknowledge
that I am living a life
relying more on myself than
on God, and there it was.
We confessed our sins. We
looked at each other's faces.
We seemed to see a little
halo, and we felt so holy.
Lord, if you want to take
me now, I'm at peace,
and you know, there it
was, we confessed our sins,
and we looked at each
other's faces.
We seemed to see a little
halo and we felt so holy,
Lord, if you want to take
me now, I'm at peace.
I've already
confessed everything.
I've already acknowledged
that I'm no good,
that I do everything
putting you aside,
so if I have a chance to
get out of here,
I'll start to straighten up more
and put you in
charge of my life.
You have to take the lead
and I will just follow.
Our strengths,
what we are are nothing.
When you face some situations,
mm, you see strengths,
weaknesses, and you realize
what I always insist on,
humanity.
Prayer is a two-way street.
You speak, you ask, and
you talk, and God listens.
And God answers as he sees fit.
If you only look at your side
and you forget about grace
and that God is listening to
you, that he is your father,
you get into this problem
because it doesn't only
depend on your faith.
That was what was happening.
Deep down I was like, I
don't deserve to be saved.
I know so much. I
practice so little.
I felt insufficient, incapable,
and that I deserved to
be in that situation of,
when you pray, you say,
oh my goodness,
I can't even ask you to
do something like that
because that's what I mean.
You look at yourself and
you forget to look at God.
It's like a son that
goes to his father
and says, "Dad, I know
you're not going to do this
because I did this, I did
that, I did the other thing.
I disobeyed, but can
you buy me a?"
Then he asks for what he wants.
That was the feeling,
but we prayed anyway.
When we were pulling
the engine cord,
the prayer was specific,
"God, let this engine start."
We would even say the
model of the engine.
It was a prayer that we showed
our total reliance on God
like all prayers,
and we believed there's
going to be an answer,
something spiritual.
No, God will do it. God will
look after me like he promised.
That part was out.
This part is very important
because we pray based
on the promises.
"Whenever you ask in my name,
knock,
and it will be open to you.
Seek and you will find
whatever you ask in my
name according to my will."
That was the imbalance in
that situation.
You look at yourself
and if you say,
"God will listen to me
because I am,"
and then you complete it
with adjectives,
you won't find many.
I am such an excellent person.
I am selfless, I pray a lot.
I evangelize. I do this,
I do that.
You won't find anything
that meets the standards.
It's even silly to say this.
I pray a lot, I evangelize.
I do this, I do that,
but the Bible says,
"Pray without ceasing."
How much do we pray?
If it says pray without
ceasing, I'm out of line.
For me,
it was like this.
Our salvation was in the
boat and the outboard motor.
Even though it was all filled
with water and et cetera.
There weren't any tools left
so we couldn't open the
engine, like we couldn't.
We couldn't even pull
the engine rope
because there was water
inside, in the carburetor,
the internal part,
the spark plugs.
Everything was
filled with water.
When we tried to pull
the rope, it didn't move.
It was stuck.
When I left the outboard all
night with it upside down
trying to get the water out,
the next day when I
pulled the rope,
I realized the rope was free.
I pulled it.
The rope came out, so just
water coming out everywhere.
When I pulled it, the
thing would go
.
I told Miltino, "The
rope is free."
He kept saying, "Yeah,
but it's no use.
It's full of water in there."
"Stay on the hammock and
I'll work there.
I'll see what I can do
with the engine."
"Nah, there's no point."
I would go back there.
Then I would come up with ideas.
I took that part of the
outboard motor
that regulates the height
and went to Miltino.
I said, "Miltino, look here.
This here could be a key
that we can use
to remove the spark plugs.
Let's try to bend it. I
don't know how.
Let's see here, let's take
the spark plug,
open it and that's it."
We've got the engine almost dry
releasing the water that's
inside the spark plugs.
He would pick it up. "Hmm.
This is not gonna work."
That made me angry.
I'm not gonna ask the guy
for his opinion anymore
because he's unbelievable.
I put the engine back in,
then I started pulling.
Vroom, vroom, vroom,
nothing happened.
I said, "Miltino, you
could you pull it?"
He said, "It's no use.
There's water inside
the spark plugs."
I said, "Okay, but let's
pull it here."
He said, "Eh, it won't work."
I said, "Miltino, stay
on the hammock, pray,
and I'll work here, okay, okay."
And so we did.
He prayed while I was
working, and I kept pulling.
And I pumped gasoline
to fill it in.
Then suddenly when I pulled
it out, it did this boom.
When Miltino saw what happened,
he jumped from the
hammock very happy.
"Man, did you see that?"
I said, "Of course I saw
it. It worked, right?
Now you'll come, right?"
We were so exhausted.
Now it worked. Okay, done.
All of a
sudden the engine goes, hmm,
and it dies again, but it
was a miracle.
It was great to see the
engine starting up again.
Then we were in a new phase,
with the possibility of
the engine working again.
The
Araguaia River
is a relatively large river,
so it wouldn't be very
difficult to find a boat
on most of the Araguaia river,
but they had the
accident in a region
where it splits into many,
many branches,
hundreds of branches,
and there's this huge amount
of islands and branches,
so that would make it extremely
difficult to find a person.
The region they stayed
after the accident
where they had the boat and the
engine and where they camped
until they managed to
get the engine working
was a place where they
would hardly be seen
by someone on a plane.
At that time of year in July,
the river's really full,
so there isn't a dry place
to stay by the river.
It's very difficult to find a
place where you can stay dry
and where you can be
seen by a plane.
The only dry place is
in the woods,
and it's difficult to see
someone there.
Pulling the boat,
we would go through the
mangroves on top of trees,
trunks, and everything.
At one point, Miltino
stepped on an alligator.
He was even almost
bitten by the alligator.
When we were close to the
larger part of the river
at the top, we heard the plane.
Then we stopped and
they stopped.
They are looking for us.
On Sunday when they went
there on the way back,
the plane was very low,
deviating from the normal route,
knowing that possibly
something had happened
because we were taking too long.
We should have already
been at the post.
The plane passed right over us.
We saw it very close to us.
"We are here, we're
here." We screamed "Ah."
Ah, the plane left. Okay,
off it went.
We felt helpless. There
was nothing we could do.
You see the plane? Ah,
look, here's the boat.
It passed right over us.
We continued the journey.
We pulled the boat out.
The stern was badly bent.
Then we used some stones
to put it into place,
and then we sort of moved it
and then bashed it into place.
We put it back the way it was.
We set up, and we spent
the night there.
The next day, we left
early in the morning.
And at night, thank you
very much, Lord.
Tomorrow morning we'll
return to our journey.
We left the next day,
very early in the morning,
put the few things we
had in the boat.
Let's go, let's go.
Hey, what in the world?
Yesterday we worked very hard
to get the engine really hot
and now nothing is happening.
We forgot to pray. Lord,
make that engine work please.
Yesterday it worked.
Why won't it work now?
Oh, there it is. All
right, now it's turning on.
Yeah, that's working.
That's how it is in our lives,
right?
We get it right, but it seems
like we just don't learn.
We
dismantled the camp.
Hmm, before taking the tarp off,
we knelt down and we
made a resolution
that whenever and wherever
we told the story,
we weren't going to go
out as heroes.
We knelt there and prayed.
In the morning, we
dismantled the camp
and started sailing again,
and we got to the crash site
and we couldn't get through.
There was no way. What do we do?
We had to take the boat out.
It took us all day to
walk about 300 meters
because now we had to
carry the boat,
and it weighs 154 pounds.
It has the engine, and
we were weak.
The boat is 19 feet long.
You start walking and it
gets stuck in the trees.
You go there, turn around a
little bit, come back here,
because we needed to get
to the other side
of the branch of the river.
There we could go sailing,
and it was again, a very
risky situation.
We had to
spend the night there again,
it was a clean place,
some big rocks.
There was a cave
inside the rocks.
I said, "Wow," I didn't
even need to ask him.
He immediately said, "Yeah,
a jaguar's home, right?"
I said, "Yeah, it looks
like a jaguar's home.
Wow, we managed to
get out there,
and now a jaguar will eat
us, eh, it's no use, right?"
God is in control. He is the
one who takes care of us.
So there's some things that,
I believe it really was a
jaguar's home,
but I think the jaguar
went for a walk that day,
so it was out.
Things
like that are spectacular.
That day when when we
were pulling the boat,
I stepped on the alligator,
a snake passed by,
a
passed by our side,
and when we arrived
at that place,
that's where the
famous cave was.
There was a place, it
was a stone cave,
and there were only
jaguar footprints.
It was indeed a jaguar's
home. What do you do?
We have to sleep here.
There's nowhere to go.
I took my stick. Can
you imagine?
Curt took out the flashlight,
which is a wisp of light,
but it does the trick.
We had to see if the
jaguar was inside.
How am I going to hit the
jaguar on the head with a stick?
Will it hurt?
Will I be able to kill the
animal before it kills us?
There was no jaguar, but
there were many footprints.
One after another, one
after another.
There was a terrible
rain during the night,
and we made the camp and
we spent the night there.
Again, I kept thinking,
"Oh my goodness, if this
engine doesn't work right,
we'll only have one chance.
If it stops working,
we'll go in with the
boat in this condition."
It was a huge boulder
with violent water.
You can't imagine what
will happen here.
We only had one chance.
That night I was
praying and thinking,
"Lord, don't let the
engine stop working."
The next morning we
started the engine
and we prayed out loud, "Lord,
you have brought us this far.
The engine cannot stop."
There is no time to
start the engine again,
because the water was calm here,
I was going into deep water,
the rapids going downhill,
but trying to get to
the other side
and head the boat to
continue going up.
When we tried to start the
engine, it didn't start,
we pulled it, we pulled it,
we pulled it.
I'm like, "Curt, hold on."
We prayed again.
"Lord, please, this
engine has to start."
I pulled half of the spinner
out, the engine started.
I headed out at full speed.
The water was going down,
and deep water on this side,
down to the start of the
trip with that rough boulder.
When I went in, the
engine hit a stick.
It lifted 'cause the
stick was loose.
It went back into the water
running without stopping.
I crossed that deeper part
with my heart in my mouth
and Curt with his
eyes wide open.
We crossed past that part. The
rapids were going downhill.
We turned in the other corner
on the other side of the river
and we started sailing, and
there were no more rapids.
I said, Curt, it was
the last place.
When we were 600 meters away
from finding the big
river again.
The rapids ended there.
They literally ended there,
because we started sailing.
The branch got wider. We
got into the other branch.
It was a relief, because
there were no more rapids.
The water was running,
but it was deep water.
The boat was like an
airplane. It went and crossed.
It is made for that.
And we went sailing and
then we saw the hand of God.
'Cause after one to two
hours sailing,
we heard a noise.
The plane was coming low.
It didn't
take us long to find them,
and it was a miracle of God.
The biggest miracle actually
was that they were able
to get the engine running.
They repaired the boat
and got it out.
Maybe if we had done the
search a day earlier,
we would've flown long hours
and wouldn't have found them.
The plane was
coming low and then we saw it.
That made us happy. We
jumped on the boat.
Look at
the plane. It's them.
They spotted us, and they
started to fly overhead.
The fear,
what worried us.
The radio would announce
that they had found us,
that we were alive.
The plane flew, came back,
and they started throwing
the most important
things in the world.
A lighter, a knife, some food.
They threw it so perfectly.
It came down tied in a
ribbon, and I took it.
It was chocolate, some food,
and there was a note from
Timothy, my son, he wrote,
"Dad, I don't know if
you have radio there,
but if you don't have it, know
that Brazil beat Argentina
two to nothing
in soccer today"
Rescued on the day Brazil
beat Argentina two to nothing.
Many people think there's
no way up or down.
I don't have emotional
strength anymore.
I don't have physical strength.
The situation is completely
out of human control.
God works.
God continues to be God
in any situation.
It doesn't depend on
our strength,
or on what we were ceasing to
be, but on the grace of God,
and his hand is always there.
Can you imagine the injury
if I had stepped on
the alligator,
if I had been bitten by a snake?
Or Curt had been
bitten by a snake?
It would be a different story.
If that engine cord had broken,
it would be a different story.
If the engine had stopped
in that situation,
the ending would be different.
The boat was never used
again. It made just one trip.
It got there and we put
it on the wall,
and it was never used again.
The story and teachings
continue that God is wonderful,
and God's grace is
better than life.
We keep moving.
I don't know how it ends,
but we cling to grace
until the end.
Ah.
There are no words.
It's the epitome of everything.
That's why I am happy.
I'm more than happy.
Top notch. Oh yeah.
...because you're in the
middle of nowhere
and you have nothing.
You can scream all you
want. No one will hear you.
I remember one day we
were saying,
"What now? What are
we going to do?
We're trapped here in a dead
end, there's nowhere to go.
What are we gonna do?"
Then Miltino got philosophical.
"No, we must go down.
Let's fix this boat
and go down."
I said, "Miltino, I'm
not going down there.
Didn't you see what happened
downstream? Go down, really?"
When you get into something
like a rapid or a waterfall,
that's when you really die.
It's from here up. I'm going
up, I'm not going down.
The Indians, who were of
little support at that point,
they had stayed way up there.
It was no use screaming
or doing anything else.
No one could really hear
us. We were far below.
Bill, the
pilot, flew to the region
a few days after they
started the trip.
I don't remember which
runway it was,
but he wanted to go to the
region they were going up,
but fly over the region.
He flew over trying to
see if he could find them
or see them, and he didn't.
The
labyrinth is so big
that when you look down on
it, you look at everything.
You're looking
around everywhere.
You can't focus on just
one branch of the river,
so if you're not visible,
there's no fire or anything,
you'll not be seen.
That's what happened.
We were very frustrated.
I said, "Oh, there's a plane.
Ah."
There was nothing we could do.
We knew it
was a very difficult trip
because of the rapids.
There are almost 80 kilometers
of rapids. They don't stop.
We were going to start
with a small engine,
the 15 horsepower, which
was what we had.
The boat was very heavy
with four passengers
and everything we
needed to survive.
All the food, weapons, clothes,
bows, arrows, lots of
things, chainsaws, axes,
all the things we needed
for a trip like that.
You start to take stock
of your own life
in terms of who you really
are, your arrogance.
In our case, on that
very journey,
we knew the jungle because we
had lived there for 10 years.
Everything we knew that
had gone down the drain
and there was nothing left.
We had to sleep in the middle
of the jungle. We had nothing.
Now the problems begin.
A lot of people live like
that. You can't go up or down.
You don't have emotional and
physical strength anymore.
The situation is completely
out of the human perspective.
God works.
As life is fragile as it is,
like a mist,
like it is said in the Bible.
When you begin to think,
you're walking,
and you're bitten by a snake.
The snake injects just
a little bit of venom
in your huge body and
you're gone.
You walk down the street,
you're perfectly healthy.
You can fall and hit
your head and die.
I don't know
if it was because of the trauma
from that whole situation,
and I'm not even trying
to justify it,
because it was a
surprise for me too.
Instead of thinking about
surviving and getting out of it,
I start thinking about things,
and that gets very difficult.
I start thinking about
the family, parents.
No one will ever find
our bodies here.
How is a funeral without a body?
I've read my whole life.
I've always loved reading.
I read everything that
fell in front of me.
I read about the great
Chesterton expeditions.
I read "Tom Sawyer," "The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer."
When you read this book,
you will see that they
are lost on an island,
and come back to watch
their own funeral.
It is a very famous book
by Mark Twain.
Eh, it wasn't any fun.
It was no fun at all.
I kept thinking about how
my father, my brother,
Marcia, Tamoto, Tiana
would react at my funeral.
That was an unexpected
reaction for me.
I don't know
if Miltino got into a tailspin,
but he wondered a lot, he
thought a lot about death.
What is going to happen now?
I said, "Okay, Miltino, so what?
We might die and if we
die, we die. What can I do?
There's nothing we can do."
It was going to be a
funeral without a body,
but he kept thinking about it.
"What's it going to be like?"
"I don't know, Miltino.
What do I know about a
funeral without a body?
Let them worry about it."
Those years
we spent in the jungle,
I didn't worry at all
because Miltino had full
knowledge about that place.
He went out with the Indians,
fished,
piloted the outboard
motor very well.
He knew the forest. He
was very prepared.
I wholeheartedly trusted him.
Whether we needed a
lighter boat,
and he told me the whole
thing about it,
why they used that boat.
Everything was very
natural to me.
Until, if I'm not mistaken,
on Wednesday they called
me into the office
to tell me that the Indians
had arrived in Patamau.
That the boat had capsized,
bent, sunk or whatever.
I don't remember the story the
Indians told about the boat,
and that boat had
disappeared in the water,
and that they thought that
Curt and Miltino had died.
Then I asked, "Did you see
the bodies?" He said, "No."
After a while, one of them,
I don't remember which one,
came and said, "Do you
understand that they might be dead?"
I said, "I understand, but
nobody found the body, right?"
I came
here on an internship
and I liked it a lot.
On April 17th, 1980,
we came here.
I was 25. Marcia was 23.
We had already been
married for a year,
and we weren't worried about it
because it was something
that we were prepared for
through courses, internships,
we already knew what was
going to happen.
We were thrilled with
the new things.
Everything was so different.
First, a language that we
didn't understand at all.
The way people dressed,
the environment,
the sound of the forest,
the night,
everything was new for us,
like when you're in a
different country.
It all looked very
interesting. "What is that?"
I wanted to learn
whenever we heard a noise
during the conversations.
When people talked,
and they talked
and we understood absolutely
nothing, what they wanted.
And everything they said
seemed important.
"What did he say? What is this?"
Also, when it came to
what we were going to eat,
how to clean the curassow,
the wild turkey, iguana,
how to eat a paca belly,
clean a pig.
Things that logically we
had never done,
but we didn't have big
problems because it was a path.
Like I said before, I
reached my goal,
and I got to where I was able
because I had been preparing
myself for so many years.
I left so much behind to be
able to be where I was going.
I came home. This is
where I wanted to stay.
That was the beginning of
the story all these years.
There were many years
learning the language,
learning a lot about
the culture.
There were good years,
our children were born,
and we really missed those
years we spent in the jungle.
When I arrived, one of the
things that was very interesting
was that in those years,
contact with outsiders
was still very limited.
In an Indigenous society,
you have a kinship line
and that is very important.
When Marcia and I arrived,
we were adopted by a family.
I had a mother, I had brothers.
I still have brothers.
The woman said, "You
will be my son."
Yunia knew was her name.
She had several children.
They called me brother.
They treated me like a brother,
and they were always
there for me.
There was another lady
too who said,
"You are going to be my son."
I was a part of her family too.
I had two mothers, which
is typical in this culture,
because they have a family
system called extended family,
and there you can ask "How
many mothers you have?"
When you go
into an environment like this,
which is completely
different from yours,
you are the learner.
You're the one who has to
learn from them
because you don't
understand anything.
If they leave you in the
jungle, you get lost and die.
They own the truth of
the forest of everything.
They know from end-to-end
how things work in nature.
It's incredible, so you
have to go willing to learn,
never to teach.
But a
cross-cultural context like that
is very interesting.
For example, our children
grew up in that context,
so the experience they
have is sensational.
It's out of this world.
For them, wherever they
are, they are fine,
because they know how to live
in another much simpler context
in the middle of the forest
and they liked it.
Even today, when they come
here to visit us, they say,
"Dad, can I go to the jungle?"
From time to time, David comes
and performs dental work
in the village.
When Larissa comes,
she also says,
"Dad, can I go to the
jungle with you?
She already took one of
my grandsons,
and soon she will take
the other one too.
They have this
cross-cultural experience
that is very positive,
and many people don't have
that privilege.
There's people from SESAI
who provide healthcare.
In the past, only
missionaries carried out
all the treatments, vaccines,
et cetera.
Today, that's SESAI's job.
We are now focused on
the educational part.
We start to teach
them how to read
and write in their
native language.
We give them handouts,
everything in the Yanomami language.
Only later we give them
the transition booklet,
and they start to
learn Portuguese.
This is to emphasize
the appreciation of
their own language first.
They learn to read and write
in their own language as well.
The trip
was unfamiliar to us,
but as we already
knew the jungle,
I always say this, we knew
how to make camp using leaves.
We knew how to shoot, we
knew how to fish.
Eh, we knew all that. We
were with the native people.
We could make fire. We had
taken easy-to-prepare food.
We had honey, we had a
lot of things
for if it was a week
trip or a 10-day trip,
we wouldn't have a problem.
Our logistics were good.
It was supported by two
Indigenous people
who also knew everything,
and we had several years of
experience in the jungle.
We knew all the dangers
and all that stuff.
In the adventure aspect,
there was also an
aspect of ignorance.
Courage is very relative in
a case like this.
One of the things we
did not foresee
is we had a lot of
experience with wooden boats,
and the wooden boats which we
used before are much heavier,
but they are also
much more stable.
The aluminum boat is fast,
but it is not as stable.
It's very edgy.
So we
decided, I don't know how,
but let's get an aluminum boat.
At that time, 30,
almost 40 years ago,
it was very difficult.
It was very difficult
because here in Boa Vista,
there were no aluminum
boats to buy.
Today you can find any
type, size and color,
and we, we managed to get
a boat from Mojine Marine.
It came chartered,
arrived in Boa Vista,
but it wasn't the
proper boat either.
It had to be that boat they
called
because it stays higher on
the surface of the water.
The one we got was a cargo boat.
It carried more,
but settled more on the
water and was slower.
That's the one we bought,
and we bought the wrong
one that was riveted.
It wasn't even welded.
Because the ones that are
used today are welded,
and stronger, which
is much better.
The rivet one is much weaker.
Then when this boat
arrived here in Boa Vista,
we had no choice but to say,
"Now we have to take it
to the village.
How are we gonna take it, by
airplane? It's not gonna work.
We could perhaps get into
the Air Force's Buffalo
and take it all the way
up to Awarise,
but Awarise goes far beyond
the post from where we live.
Then we would have to
bring the boat back
with a lot of waterfalls
and everything.
We decided, "Ah, let's go
up the river."
We set everything up, all
the necessary material, fuel,
tools, food, and we take two
Indigenous people with us.
We prepared everything for our
trip, which would be a feat.
Right on the first day,
or didn't even take a day,
we started to sense what
we were going to face.
On the first, right on
the first day,
or it didn't even take a day,
we started to sense what
we were going to face.
Because it was a river
with a lot of rapids,
there were times when
we had to stop.
Two or three people had to
go down on top of a rock,
and then we had to go
through the other side
because the engine didn't
have enough power to pass.
I'm talking about rapids here.
Imagine when the rapids or the
waterfalls are huge. No way.
We already started to see
this trip is going to
be challenging.
We kept going, after all,
we were young at the time
with an adventurous spirit,
and so we were saying,
"Let's go."
It is not a straight river
or one that has curves,
but it gets wide, so
it is a very different
and very bumpy river.
We knew we were going to
face some challenges ahead.
There
was no other way.
We had to choose the smaller
branches of the river,
and we had no idea
where we were.
We didn't know because we always
opted for smaller branches
with fewer rapids or
weaker rapids
so we could keep going
up the river.
We did not know where we were,
whether we were too
far to the left,
to the right of the main branch,
if there was a main branch,
because that was the option.
We were going up.
And we kept going up without
knowing where we were,
but as we went up, we realized
that we had passed the
point of no return.
There was no way to go back.
As we went up and passed
waterfalls, some of them were big.
We had to take the boat out.
We knew we couldn't go
down any further,
because when you're
going up the river,
you can still
control the engine.
You can stop, you can
look where you're going,
you can go back, you
can even go in reverse.
We knew that the only way
now was to go forward,
and we were getting more scared
because the rapids didn't end.
We would pass one, and soon
after there was another,
and another and
another and another.
And sometimes taking
the boat out,
passing through the
woods, and we were scared,
because we couldn't give
up on the trip.
We had to keep going.
I remember
that when we arrived,
we initially worked
hard to learn
the language and the culture,
so we decided not to have
children for practically two years
so we could adapt
ourselves to the place
and learn the language
in the best possible way.
We were very careful to do
things as best as possible.
There are people who learn the
language faster than others,
but it's a very
complex language,
and it has many
onomatopoeic sounds,
and sometimes the sound
they make is even funny.
They come and take the
arrow and then
so cachow means that the
arrow really penetrated.
It has all these sounds.
I always say I'm going to
die learning this language
because there's a lot to learn.
It's no use to look it
up in the dictionary.
You have to create your
own dictionary.
It is complicated. It's no
use even going to Google.
I type there, what is this?
Google won't tell you anything
because it's a language
that hasn't been described
ipsis litteris yet.
Hello?
Hello?
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Oh.
It's beautiful.
They say, "Wow, Curt, you
speak Yanomami so well."
It's not that I speak well,
but the more you imitate,
the closer you get to them.
Even if you can't really
speak the language,
I try to imitate by
making little jokes.
They say, "Wow, this guy
is one of ours."
That's not true. I still
have a lot to learn.
Curt
is so generous.
Sometimes I tell him that
he doesn't suit himself.
I say, "But you don't
suit yourself"
because Curt is a very,
let me see how I can
define Curt.
Curt is a very god-fearing
man that doesn't have,
I mean he's a very,
he's a very intimate
relationship with God.
He prays a lot and I have to
learn more of that from him.
I am very much like I
pray when I'm walking,
when I'm driving, when I'm at
work, I pray a lot like that,
but he stops, prays until
early morning.
So before he goes to sleep
he puts his two pillows
on the floor and kneels.
He is this man of prayer,
this something that is a
rule in his life, understand.
I think that's what
sustains him.
So when I tell people that
he doesn't suit himself,
because he's very grumpy,
but he doesn't mean it.
He complains about everything,
and I say, stop ba.
He's a curmudgeon.
He was born a curmudgeon,
but he's very funny.
He's very happy.
That's why he doesn't
suit himself,
because he has this grumpy
side, and I think that,
I don't know why he just likes
to be against everything,
but he's very happy, he
is incredible,
and his love for the
Indigenous people too.
He is very happy. He is very
happy with his ministry.
He is very happy with his
family. He is a very happy guy.
I think that he is a little
too happy and silly sometimes,
I'm much more serious.
Curt ends up being very funny,
and it's too much for me,
because I'm much more serious,
but we get along very well.
There's a balance.
Hey.
They have
more knowledge than we do,
and we only have more knowledge
in areas like technology
and medicine which they
don't have access to,
and if you were on your own
you would die in a
place like that.
How did they survive all these
years living the way they do?
There is a similarity.
Of course we overvalue
technological knowledge,
but if you stop to think about
it, we can't even make a map.
Your personal knowledge
is based on the technology
that came through college,
companies, secrets,
but if you go back
to the basics,
you don't know how to make fire,
they do.
You;re living in a society
that has provided these things
through centuries of
trial and error.
But if that all ended and
you came back,
how would you make fire?
I had colleagues in the
village who allowed me to study
at least for a while,
and I enjoyed it a lot,
and I went out a lot,
and I liked to do that.
I did it with pleasure,
and it was like this.
Almost every Saturday,
I went out.
And by the time I went out
I regretted it bitterly,
because they go walking
through the woods all day.
Literally the whole day.
I was in excellent
physical shape,
but when you start walking,
you warm up.
You walk and walk and walk
and you don't see anything.
People think that going
into the woods,
it's like going to a
supermarket.
You pick something here,
something else there,
grab a banana, kill an animal,
and go back home with
the cart ready.
Many times you don't
see anything.
The people get hungry for meat.
They call it,
which means to get
hungry for meat.
They didn't find game.
I went out, sometimes
when I went out
they had found something.
Someone had heard the noise of
pigs or seen the footprints.
We would go with more certainty,
but I remember leaving early,
by 6 am I would be walking.
I would walk the whole day,
and come home at the
end of the day.
That part was interesting,
because when we stopped
we would talk,
and then I would learn
the language.
That part helped me a lot
too in my relationship
and the vocabulary for that
kind of walks, hunting.
To this day, we all know if I
find a feather on the ground,
I know from which bird it was.
I can get one or another wrong,
but I know a feather of a
toucan, a macaw,
a curassow, a jacu.
You learn these things.
What animal is singing,
what bird you're seeing.
Something very cool about
learning their language
is when you call an or locate the pigs,
they listen to the
noise the pig does.
They heard it from far
away, so they took it.
Stopped, and they always
took two types of arrows.
An arrowhead for a large
animal, which is like a knife,
so you can have an idea,
and an arrow for birds,
which is quite different.
They would leave the
arrows for birds,
and only take two or
three tipped arrows,
which is called roka.
Think of a knife, only it was
made of very strong bamboo,
and then we could go on
top of the pigs.
Then it got crazy.
There was a rush.
They would kill several of them.
It was far away. They
would disappear.
I would always stick
with one of them
and go after them
with a shotgun,
and usually kill one or
two or even more.
Then we stopped,
and they went back to
where the arrows were,
where they had left things.
I used to go crazy about it
because it's all the same.
You have no idea
how they have such a
sense of direction.
It still amazes me to this day.
These things seem so strange.
You'll see that behind all
that there's a common feeling,
and that's very interesting.
Look at it, any other
culture today,
no matter how non-Western
or how different it may be,
mm, you will see the same
human characteristics
that we all have.
Love for children,
scolding them.
When you look at it,
there is no difference,
no difference at all.
When you understand, you live
together, and you admire,
you really appreciate what
is common to all of us.
The joys, the pains,
the abundance of food,
a good hunt with a lot of pork,
a lot of joy that this brings.
The same thing if you go
to a Rodesio steakhouse,
it's just the same thing.
You understand this part,
and we already knew
this from the beginning,
but when you really process it,
for example, I
sometimes go to Cassia,
a hospital unit there,
and what does a guy feel?
He misses home. He wants
to go back, same thing.
I remember I was talking
to my brother-in-law Akobe,
and I was already speaking
the language well,
and I was looking for
word longing.
We think that longing
is something exclusive
to the Portuguese language,
or the Latin languages,
especially Portuguese.
It surely doesn't
exist in English.
You will say I miss you or
something else,
but the feeling is the same.
It's not that we feel more
because our word is better.
I was talking to Akobe,
I said I was looking for
the word longing.
"Let's see if they have it,"
I said.
Sometimes you think of
when you were little,
what your father was like.
I was saying a lot of things,
trying to find that word.
He listened and turned to
me and said the following,
"Funny white people
feel that too."
I couldn't find the word,
but he said the same
thing I was looking for.
He was astonished. And
you also think like that.
We use the word saudade,
and saudade really is a
spectacular word in our language.
Joy, sadness, feelings,
and many things common
to all peoples.
This is difficult to teach,
or for a surrounding
society to understand,
because there's
always this idea.
No, he is an Indian. He doesn't
understand or know anything.
He doesn't have anything.
He's worthless.
That is a very bad
understanding.
There are still many here in
Boa Vista who think like that.
They say, "They're just
occupying land,"
and then there's the
political line
that I won't even talk about.
There's gold digger invasions.
It's a horror what has
been happening today.
We continued for two more
days without major incidents,
but we were scared because
the rapids didn't end.
We were going up, I reckon
maybe 62 miles of just river.
What was the problem?
You passed a rapid, sailed
maybe five, 10 minutes.
Then you saw water in
front of you,
and it was a big discouragement.
You'd get there, see if
you could pass.
If not, we'd unload the boat,
pass everything by the side,
taking the boat out
and continuing.
As we
climbed operating that vine,
the boat docked and
started to return.
It came back and got a good
hold of that thick vine,
and it turned over with
the force of the water.
And it turned over, and
everything that was in the boat
went down, including us.
And Milton just said
to the Indians,
"Take the machete and jump."
One of them grabbed the machete
and they jumped onto the bank.
I saw Miltino down river going
down among the other things
that were floating,
other things had already gone
to the bottom of the river,
the boat capsized, and
then began to descend.
I also threw myself into
the water and went down.
In the middle of things,
we went deep down,
the Indians then stayed on top
and went straight to the bank.
When the boat
capsized, I entered the water
and I was pulled right
into the current,
and got out into a whirlpool.
The only thing I had
time to grab,
which is what was within
reach, were two oars.
I sank with these oars
because I got into a
whirlpool of water.
It pulled me down with
the two oars,
and they were cedar oars.
They float, they give
you a certain buoyancy.
I sank and I went very
deep. Everything went dark.
I just remember the
darkness, my ear hurting.
I don't know how deep I
was, and I was going down.
I can swim. I was in good
physical shape.
Despite being tired, but
there was nothing I could do.
Then begins the first
direct intervention of God
because I said a prayer.
In fact, it was a cry.
God saved me.
Immediately I went up
as if the whirlpool
started to do the opposite.
Instead of pulling me to
the surface of the water,
I was floating.
I saw Curt way down on
top of the boat,
and I swam toward Curt,
but everything has sunk.
We could see the boxes
floating away.
We had wooden boxes with food,
with matches, with a stove,
with everything we needed,
and it was sinking.
It's not scary drowning,
it's a very bad feeling, which
is what was happening to me.
When I said this prayer,
in fact, it was a cry,
a cry for help and I went up.
The time I went up, the
feeling was not just of relief,
it was having gone through
a trauma there.
The time that I sank,
it was more of a
physical reaction
than an emotional one of fear.
Now we are really lost.
Now our situation is
going to be very serious,
but you just keep
doing something.
We put the boat on the bank
and sat down for a while,
looked at the whole situation,
and it was very serious
because of our two traveling
companions stayed far up river,
and we put the boat there,
and we went up
to try and find them,
but we couldn't,
because there were so many
branches and so many islands
that we could not move
on to the next island,
and they couldn't get
down either.
And we stayed far away
thinking about that mile,
and that's conservative.
They tried to find us and
we tried to find them.
The boat
was really crumpled.
It looked like a U,
you couldn't even see
it was a boat anymore.
When we turned around, the
engine was still attached,
and it still had the gas tank.
The tank was still
attached to the hose,
so it was all providential
so that we wouldn't be
left with nothing.
There was no alternative
but to stay there,
there was nowhere to go
and we were very tired,
exhausted from that rapid
we went through.
We had no choice. We had
to stay there.
There was nowhere to go.
We had to fix the few
things we had.
Opened the bag I had,
opened everything.
Some things were wet.
Then I did a silly thing
and put these clothes on
top of a rock,
on the edge of the river to dry,
but during the night
the river rose so much
that in the next day there
weren't any clothes left,
everything was gone.
The little things I
had were gone.
Everything starts to come
into your mind.
What now? What's
going to happen?
Those thoughts are always, ah,
there.
Our family members, what
will they think?
How long are we
going to be here?
Will we ever get out of here?
What is God trying to
teach us with this?
Miltino thought about death.
He was very worried about
how his funeral would be
with no body.
I said, "Miltino,
forget about it.
There's a chance we might die."
It's a possibility, but I
kept thinking,
what is God's purpose in taking
our lives in that context?
What now? No food, no
material for survival.
Machete, if we had a machete
we could cut hearts
of palm to eat.
We looked for something to eat,
but the jungle was just
really scarce.
It wasn't fruit season
either. There was nothing.
We looked for some root.
There was nothing, so we
could only drink water.
Whenever we got hungry, we
filled our bellies with water,
but it didn't kill our hunger,
it just alleviated hunger.
We spent three days in
this routine.
We started to get really weak,
and I heard a noise
in the woods.
Chop, chop, chop. When I
looked, I saw an alligator.
It was this big.
I said to Miltino, "Miltino,
an alligator.
Let's catch this
alligator and eat it."
And then he said, "Okay."
I said, "I'll take the
front and you take the back.
You grab a stick, and
I'll take the front."
I said, "I'll take the
front and you take the back,
and you grab a stick
and I'll take the front,
and we'll mess with it
to distract it."
No sooner said than
done, bap, hit him hard.
Sure enough, that's
what happened.
I took the front, very
slowly feeling my way,
and he took the back.
The alligator stayed by
my side looking at me.
Then it raised its little head
like this and did.
When he did this,
Miltino came from
behind and hit it.
Bop, we killed it with a
stick. Then came the problem.
There was no fire, no knife.
How do you open a hard
skin like that?
I just remember that we
grabbed its tail
because the tail is all
full of stuff.
We break off that little piece.
Then we would have a few
pieces of meat.
We took it and ate it. We
couldn't kill the hunger.
We ended up not being
able to use the alligator
to satisfy our hunger.
We knew that death was
one of the possibilities,
because what were you gonna
do in the middle of the jungle
with nothing, without
fire, without a machete,
without being able to
do anything to survive.
We had nothing. It really
was a chaotic situation.
And we were facing death,
because we said,
humanly speaking,
there is no way out of here.
How are we going to get out
of here now, broken boat,
I don't know if it will be, if
it will work again, no food.
It's a matter of time,
I think, for us to die.
Our salvation is still
that we have the boat,
the broken boat.
The engine is still there.
There is some fuel
left in the tank,
and the best thing to do
is to dig into it
and try to find a way
to get it working again,
but then comes Miltino
and says, "it's no use.
There are no tools."
I've never seen
Miltino like that,
so close in these
difficult times,
because Miltino was a very
relaxed guy, nice to talk to,
but when the difficulties
came, he just got depressed.
You start
making an assessment
of your own life in relation
to who you really are,
your arrogance in Aike,
on that very trip
of 10 years of experience
living in the jungle,
everything that had gone
down the drain,
and there was nothing left.
You start thinking about many
of your own mistakes too.
It's hard to explain it, but
it's a suffering situation
and you make new resolutions.
That came from this
experience of human fragility
in relation to life, emotions,
feelings.
I've always been a person who
has a high pain threshold.
I always thought about
how I would react
in a situation like that.
I learned a lot from
that experience,
and it has been with me
since that time.
I may be in a situation right
now of great acknowledgement,
you know, some things like that
have happened occasionally,
but I say remember,
remember who you really are
that was in those days
of suffering.
A kind of depression. You
won't get out of here.
It is even in Curt's way.
The jungle,
especially the Amazon
jungle, for me is impressive.
It is exuberant. It
is fascinating.
It opens your eyes
because it is such an
immense thing, so diverse.
There are trees of all
types, size and color
with those vines and whatever.
You say, "Wow, what a
beautiful thing."
It has a big impact, but
apart from being
such a beautiful, exuberant,
and fantastic place,
it's a place that scares you.
It gives you a certain fear,
a dread,
because this very jungle
can also swallow you up,
and it's not just the
large animals like jaguars
and other animals, but
let's say mosquitoes,
ants, termites, snakes,
these smaller insects,
they can crush you.
It can make you fall
into such a depression
and you can even die
because of small insects,
and if you don't know how
to get out of that context,
the jungle will, you
know, swallow you alive.
For the Indigenous people,
it's easy.
The jungle is their home.
If you are with an
Indigenous person,
you are at home with him.
He takes a leaf, then
he weaves it,
and makes something to
carry things.
He goes there, takes the vine,
does something for this or that,
rips off some bark from
the trees and makes a net.
For him, it's the
backyard of his house,
but if you leave the trail for
a little bit, you get lost.
You look everywhere,
everything is the same.
Everything is green.
You only see the woods,
the trees,
and you get lost
without realizing,
and there's nowhere to run.
I sat down with Miltino,
we talked and I said,
"Miltino, do I think there's
a chance we might die?"
"Yes, it's one of those
possibilities,
but I believe that God has
a purpose for our lives,
and one of the purposes is
for him to work in our lives.
Let's stop here.
Let's sit down and talk
and let's clear
everything up with God.
There are many things here
that we do determinedly,
and God is completely out
of the picture."
That's it.
We're living on the
sidelines with no purpose.
We're doing things in the
name of the gospel of Jesus.
But Jesus is out of our
routine here of our day-to-day.
It is God trying to teach
us how to rely on him.
We were doing things
just for the sake of it
with God out of the way
thinking we were the ones.
Let's confess our sins.
With regard to our
colleagues at the Post
and everything that we
did, the steps we took too.
Let's ask for forgiveness.
What else can we do?
We were like, let me see,
if I can remember anything else
that I have to get
right with God
because I acknowledge
that I am living a life
relying more on myself than
on God, and there it was.
We confessed our sins. We
looked at each other's faces.
We seemed to see a little
halo, and we felt so holy.
Lord, if you want to take
me now, I'm at peace,
and you know, there it
was, we confessed our sins,
and we looked at each
other's faces.
We seemed to see a little
halo and we felt so holy,
Lord, if you want to take
me now, I'm at peace.
I've already
confessed everything.
I've already acknowledged
that I'm no good,
that I do everything
putting you aside,
so if I have a chance to
get out of here,
I'll start to straighten up more
and put you in
charge of my life.
You have to take the lead
and I will just follow.
Our strengths,
what we are are nothing.
When you face some situations,
mm, you see strengths,
weaknesses, and you realize
what I always insist on,
humanity.
Prayer is a two-way street.
You speak, you ask, and
you talk, and God listens.
And God answers as he sees fit.
If you only look at your side
and you forget about grace
and that God is listening to
you, that he is your father,
you get into this problem
because it doesn't only
depend on your faith.
That was what was happening.
Deep down I was like, I
don't deserve to be saved.
I know so much. I
practice so little.
I felt insufficient, incapable,
and that I deserved to
be in that situation of,
when you pray, you say,
oh my goodness,
I can't even ask you to
do something like that
because that's what I mean.
You look at yourself and
you forget to look at God.
It's like a son that
goes to his father
and says, "Dad, I know
you're not going to do this
because I did this, I did
that, I did the other thing.
I disobeyed, but can
you buy me a?"
Then he asks for what he wants.
That was the feeling,
but we prayed anyway.
When we were pulling
the engine cord,
the prayer was specific,
"God, let this engine start."
We would even say the
model of the engine.
It was a prayer that we showed
our total reliance on God
like all prayers,
and we believed there's
going to be an answer,
something spiritual.
No, God will do it. God will
look after me like he promised.
That part was out.
This part is very important
because we pray based
on the promises.
"Whenever you ask in my name,
knock,
and it will be open to you.
Seek and you will find
whatever you ask in my
name according to my will."
That was the imbalance in
that situation.
You look at yourself
and if you say,
"God will listen to me
because I am,"
and then you complete it
with adjectives,
you won't find many.
I am such an excellent person.
I am selfless, I pray a lot.
I evangelize. I do this,
I do that.
You won't find anything
that meets the standards.
It's even silly to say this.
I pray a lot, I evangelize.
I do this, I do that,
but the Bible says,
"Pray without ceasing."
How much do we pray?
If it says pray without
ceasing, I'm out of line.
For me,
it was like this.
Our salvation was in the
boat and the outboard motor.
Even though it was all filled
with water and et cetera.
There weren't any tools left
so we couldn't open the
engine, like we couldn't.
We couldn't even pull
the engine rope
because there was water
inside, in the carburetor,
the internal part,
the spark plugs.
Everything was
filled with water.
When we tried to pull
the rope, it didn't move.
It was stuck.
When I left the outboard all
night with it upside down
trying to get the water out,
the next day when I
pulled the rope,
I realized the rope was free.
I pulled it.
The rope came out, so just
water coming out everywhere.
When I pulled it, the
thing would go
.
I told Miltino, "The
rope is free."
He kept saying, "Yeah,
but it's no use.
It's full of water in there."
"Stay on the hammock and
I'll work there.
I'll see what I can do
with the engine."
"Nah, there's no point."
I would go back there.
Then I would come up with ideas.
I took that part of the
outboard motor
that regulates the height
and went to Miltino.
I said, "Miltino, look here.
This here could be a key
that we can use
to remove the spark plugs.
Let's try to bend it. I
don't know how.
Let's see here, let's take
the spark plug,
open it and that's it."
We've got the engine almost dry
releasing the water that's
inside the spark plugs.
He would pick it up. "Hmm.
This is not gonna work."
That made me angry.
I'm not gonna ask the guy
for his opinion anymore
because he's unbelievable.
I put the engine back in,
then I started pulling.
Vroom, vroom, vroom,
nothing happened.
I said, "Miltino, you
could you pull it?"
He said, "It's no use.
There's water inside
the spark plugs."
I said, "Okay, but let's
pull it here."
He said, "Eh, it won't work."
I said, "Miltino, stay
on the hammock, pray,
and I'll work here, okay, okay."
And so we did.
He prayed while I was
working, and I kept pulling.
And I pumped gasoline
to fill it in.
Then suddenly when I pulled
it out, it did this boom.
When Miltino saw what happened,
he jumped from the
hammock very happy.
"Man, did you see that?"
I said, "Of course I saw
it. It worked, right?
Now you'll come, right?"
We were so exhausted.
Now it worked. Okay, done.
All of a
sudden the engine goes, hmm,
and it dies again, but it
was a miracle.
It was great to see the
engine starting up again.
Then we were in a new phase,
with the possibility of
the engine working again.
The
Araguaia River
is a relatively large river,
so it wouldn't be very
difficult to find a boat
on most of the Araguaia river,
but they had the
accident in a region
where it splits into many,
many branches,
hundreds of branches,
and there's this huge amount
of islands and branches,
so that would make it extremely
difficult to find a person.
The region they stayed
after the accident
where they had the boat and the
engine and where they camped
until they managed to
get the engine working
was a place where they
would hardly be seen
by someone on a plane.
At that time of year in July,
the river's really full,
so there isn't a dry place
to stay by the river.
It's very difficult to find a
place where you can stay dry
and where you can be
seen by a plane.
The only dry place is
in the woods,
and it's difficult to see
someone there.
Pulling the boat,
we would go through the
mangroves on top of trees,
trunks, and everything.
At one point, Miltino
stepped on an alligator.
He was even almost
bitten by the alligator.
When we were close to the
larger part of the river
at the top, we heard the plane.
Then we stopped and
they stopped.
They are looking for us.
On Sunday when they went
there on the way back,
the plane was very low,
deviating from the normal route,
knowing that possibly
something had happened
because we were taking too long.
We should have already
been at the post.
The plane passed right over us.
We saw it very close to us.
"We are here, we're
here." We screamed "Ah."
Ah, the plane left. Okay,
off it went.
We felt helpless. There
was nothing we could do.
You see the plane? Ah,
look, here's the boat.
It passed right over us.
We continued the journey.
We pulled the boat out.
The stern was badly bent.
Then we used some stones
to put it into place,
and then we sort of moved it
and then bashed it into place.
We put it back the way it was.
We set up, and we spent
the night there.
The next day, we left
early in the morning.
And at night, thank you
very much, Lord.
Tomorrow morning we'll
return to our journey.
We left the next day,
very early in the morning,
put the few things we
had in the boat.
Let's go, let's go.
Hey, what in the world?
Yesterday we worked very hard
to get the engine really hot
and now nothing is happening.
We forgot to pray. Lord,
make that engine work please.
Yesterday it worked.
Why won't it work now?
Oh, there it is. All
right, now it's turning on.
Yeah, that's working.
That's how it is in our lives,
right?
We get it right, but it seems
like we just don't learn.
We
dismantled the camp.
Hmm, before taking the tarp off,
we knelt down and we
made a resolution
that whenever and wherever
we told the story,
we weren't going to go
out as heroes.
We knelt there and prayed.
In the morning, we
dismantled the camp
and started sailing again,
and we got to the crash site
and we couldn't get through.
There was no way. What do we do?
We had to take the boat out.
It took us all day to
walk about 300 meters
because now we had to
carry the boat,
and it weighs 154 pounds.
It has the engine, and
we were weak.
The boat is 19 feet long.
You start walking and it
gets stuck in the trees.
You go there, turn around a
little bit, come back here,
because we needed to get
to the other side
of the branch of the river.
There we could go sailing,
and it was again, a very
risky situation.
We had to
spend the night there again,
it was a clean place,
some big rocks.
There was a cave
inside the rocks.
I said, "Wow," I didn't
even need to ask him.
He immediately said, "Yeah,
a jaguar's home, right?"
I said, "Yeah, it looks
like a jaguar's home.
Wow, we managed to
get out there,
and now a jaguar will eat
us, eh, it's no use, right?"
God is in control. He is the
one who takes care of us.
So there's some things that,
I believe it really was a
jaguar's home,
but I think the jaguar
went for a walk that day,
so it was out.
Things
like that are spectacular.
That day when when we
were pulling the boat,
I stepped on the alligator,
a snake passed by,
a
passed by our side,
and when we arrived
at that place,
that's where the
famous cave was.
There was a place, it
was a stone cave,
and there were only
jaguar footprints.
It was indeed a jaguar's
home. What do you do?
We have to sleep here.
There's nowhere to go.
I took my stick. Can
you imagine?
Curt took out the flashlight,
which is a wisp of light,
but it does the trick.
We had to see if the
jaguar was inside.
How am I going to hit the
jaguar on the head with a stick?
Will it hurt?
Will I be able to kill the
animal before it kills us?
There was no jaguar, but
there were many footprints.
One after another, one
after another.
There was a terrible
rain during the night,
and we made the camp and
we spent the night there.
Again, I kept thinking,
"Oh my goodness, if this
engine doesn't work right,
we'll only have one chance.
If it stops working,
we'll go in with the
boat in this condition."
It was a huge boulder
with violent water.
You can't imagine what
will happen here.
We only had one chance.
That night I was
praying and thinking,
"Lord, don't let the
engine stop working."
The next morning we
started the engine
and we prayed out loud, "Lord,
you have brought us this far.
The engine cannot stop."
There is no time to
start the engine again,
because the water was calm here,
I was going into deep water,
the rapids going downhill,
but trying to get to
the other side
and head the boat to
continue going up.
When we tried to start the
engine, it didn't start,
we pulled it, we pulled it,
we pulled it.
I'm like, "Curt, hold on."
We prayed again.
"Lord, please, this
engine has to start."
I pulled half of the spinner
out, the engine started.
I headed out at full speed.
The water was going down,
and deep water on this side,
down to the start of the
trip with that rough boulder.
When I went in, the
engine hit a stick.
It lifted 'cause the
stick was loose.
It went back into the water
running without stopping.
I crossed that deeper part
with my heart in my mouth
and Curt with his
eyes wide open.
We crossed past that part. The
rapids were going downhill.
We turned in the other corner
on the other side of the river
and we started sailing, and
there were no more rapids.
I said, Curt, it was
the last place.
When we were 600 meters away
from finding the big
river again.
The rapids ended there.
They literally ended there,
because we started sailing.
The branch got wider. We
got into the other branch.
It was a relief, because
there were no more rapids.
The water was running,
but it was deep water.
The boat was like an
airplane. It went and crossed.
It is made for that.
And we went sailing and
then we saw the hand of God.
'Cause after one to two
hours sailing,
we heard a noise.
The plane was coming low.
It didn't
take us long to find them,
and it was a miracle of God.
The biggest miracle actually
was that they were able
to get the engine running.
They repaired the boat
and got it out.
Maybe if we had done the
search a day earlier,
we would've flown long hours
and wouldn't have found them.
The plane was
coming low and then we saw it.
That made us happy. We
jumped on the boat.
Look at
the plane. It's them.
They spotted us, and they
started to fly overhead.
The fear,
what worried us.
The radio would announce
that they had found us,
that we were alive.
The plane flew, came back,
and they started throwing
the most important
things in the world.
A lighter, a knife, some food.
They threw it so perfectly.
It came down tied in a
ribbon, and I took it.
It was chocolate, some food,
and there was a note from
Timothy, my son, he wrote,
"Dad, I don't know if
you have radio there,
but if you don't have it, know
that Brazil beat Argentina
two to nothing
in soccer today"
Rescued on the day Brazil
beat Argentina two to nothing.
Many people think there's
no way up or down.
I don't have emotional
strength anymore.
I don't have physical strength.
The situation is completely
out of human control.
God works.
God continues to be God
in any situation.
It doesn't depend on
our strength,
or on what we were ceasing to
be, but on the grace of God,
and his hand is always there.
Can you imagine the injury
if I had stepped on
the alligator,
if I had been bitten by a snake?
Or Curt had been
bitten by a snake?
It would be a different story.
If that engine cord had broken,
it would be a different story.
If the engine had stopped
in that situation,
the ending would be different.
The boat was never used
again. It made just one trip.
It got there and we put
it on the wall,
and it was never used again.
The story and teachings
continue that God is wonderful,
and God's grace is
better than life.
We keep moving.
I don't know how it ends,
but we cling to grace
until the end.
Ah.
There are no words.
It's the epitome of everything.
That's why I am happy.
I'm more than happy.
Top notch. Oh yeah.