Four siblings, aged 13, nine, four and a one-year-old baby, were found alive 40 days after their plane crashed in Columbia’s Amazon. Their mother and the other adults on board the plane when it crashed on 1 May died.
Columbia’s President Gustavo Petro said finding the children was ‘a joy for the whole country’ and that by surviving alone for weeks, the siblings had ‘achieved an example of total survival that will remain in history’, referring to them as ‘the children of peace and the children of Columbia’.
The children are currently receiving medical treatment in the Columbian capital Bogota. Mr Petro said that when he contacted their grandfather to share the good news, he told him, ‘the mother jungle has returned them’.
The siblings and their mother had been flying from Aracuara in Amazonas province to San José del Guaviare on a Cessna 206 aircraft when its engine failed.
The army found the bodies of the three adults who had been travelling with the children at the crash site. According to Reuters news agency, information from the civil aviation authority suggested the children escaped and tried to find help.
In May, a search and rescue team found some of the children’s belongings, including a drinking bottle, scissors, a hair tie and a makeshift shelter. They also found footprints. This evidence suggested the siblings were alone in the rainforest, a dangerous place home to predators, including jaguars and snakes.
The children’s grandfather, Fidencio Valencia, recently told reporters the children are acquainted with the jungle and survived by using indigenous knowledge of fruits and jungle survival skills they learned from their elders in the Huitoto group to survive before they were found. The Huitoto people learn hunting, fishing and foraging at a young age.
After the crash, the eldest kid, Lesley, built makeshift shelters held together by hair ties. The children foraged for food and evaded dangerous predators and armed militia groups.
After the plane crashed, the children survived for a few days on fariña, a type of flour they found in the plane’s wreckage. Thereafter, they survived on seeds and fruit from the forest.
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Head of the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare, Astrid Cáceres, said that the ‘jungle was in harvest’ at the time of the crash, so the children could eat fruit that was in bloom.
The kids also used to play a survival game together, the children’s aunt told Colombian media.
John Moreno, leader of the Guanano group in Vaupes, in the south-eastern part of Colombia, said that the kids were ‘raised by their grandmother’, a widely respected indigenous leader.
‘They used what they learned in the community and relied on their ancestral knowledge to survive,’ he added.
When the children were discovered, around 150 troops and 200 volunteers from indigenous groups were involved in the operation, which covered 300km sq.
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Feature Image: Reuters
