It was the most astonishing survival story of this and maybe any year. Four children, ages 13, 9, 4 and 1, rescued after 40 days lost in the Amazon rainforest, following a plane crash that killed all the adults on board, including their mother.
It was a bona fide miracle. Apart from the obvious challenges of finding food and shelter and remaining dry and healthy in an environment where it rains 16 hours a day, the Amazon is almost 100 per cent peril: Anacondas, boa constrictors, piranhas, tarantulas, jaguars, killer frogs and a seemingly endless quantity of other deadly animals and poisonous plants.
How did they do it? One common theory is that, almost from birth, the kids had been taught the skills needed for self-sufficiency. As Utah State University anthropologist David Lancy told Reason magazine soon after the rescue: “They do this routinely. They look after their brothers and sisters, including babies. They hunt. They forage. They build shelters.”
Given these are not things that Kiwi kids are typically raised to do, this got me wondering about the chances of children in this country surviving a long spell alone in the wild. I was not optimistic. As any good talkback caller will tell you, kids these days have been raised on a cocktail of Jacinda’s kindness, YouTube influencers and parental mollycoddling, and as a result they are all soft and hopeless.
Is there a single Kiwi parent who believes their child could survive 40 days in the Amazon? I doubt my own kids could survive a week alone in their own home, even with a fully stocked fridge. If the inability to make their own breakfast didn’t kill them, the sibling rivalry surely would.
Then again, maybe our kids are more resourceful than we think. Maybe the issue is that, unlike Amazonian parents, we’re just not giving them the chance to show it. To test this theory, I asked former RNZAF survival trainer Stu Gilbert if I could watch him put some kids through one of his famous survival workshops in the Waitakere Ranges.
Gilbert is one of the country’s leading survival experts, having spent his whole career in the field. He was a senior instructor at the Royal New Zealand Air Force Survival Training Centre, responsible for training flight crew in survival techniques, was instrumental in setting up a Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape training programme for the RNZAF, has served in two operational deployments to East Timor, and has been invited to attend numerous international conferences and development forums. Although he now operates his own survival training school, he still provides the New Zealand Defence Force with guidance and recommendations on survival policy and training.
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In other words, he pretty much wrote the book on how to survive in the wild, although, when one of the kids on the course later asked if he’d written any books on survival, he replied: “I don’t have time to write books. I’m too busy out here doing it”.
His challenge that Sunday morning was to transform nine kids, ages 6 to 12, into a pack of hardened survivalists, with the skills needed to survive 40 days in the jungle after a plane crash in the Amazon. He had three hours.
They went into the bush on the back of Gilbert’s ute. Because it was only a couple of hundred metres, and their parents were following on foot, the ute seemed unnecessary, but one of the first things survival experts will tell you is not to do anything unnecessary. The ute trip was a vital part of the experience; a signal to the kids that they were leaving the world in which they were dependent on their parents, and entering a world in which they were able to look after themselves. Far more than just a ride from A to B, it was a transition from dependence to independence. Then again, I guess it’s possible Gilbert just didn’t feel like walking.
When they arrived at base camp, he ran them through some basic safety stuff, then launched straight into a speech about the value of murdering cute, furry animals.
Wielding a slingshot, he said: “This gives you the opportunity to take a small animal down and then we go over to it and do what we need to do to process that and to consume it and eat it.”
I was shocked by the graphic nature of that description – the use of the word “process” seemed especially gratuitous – and I watched the faces of the kids for signs of shock, but saw none. I wondered whether this was emotional resilience or emotional repression, the impact of which might only be discovered years later, by a trained counsellor.
Regardless, slingshot target practice indicated that no rabbit, nor any other animal, big or small, need ever be concerned about being taken down, processed or eaten by these children.
After slingshot training they moved into fire training. Gilbert gathered wood, used his knife to split it, divided it into different grades, demonstrated the optimal jenga pattern for maximizing airflow, and finally used a flint to throw sparks onto the tinder pile. The kids were transfixed by the process, and showed some good theoretical knowledge in response to his questions about the physics of it, but when it came time for them to build their own, they wandered around as if they’d never seen wood before.
Gilbert, watching on, speculated about the implications for the likelihood of their survival. He muttered under his breath, “They’d struggle, wouldn’t they?” But, like any good trained survivalist, he knew the importance of morale, and kept his pessimism to himself.
“Don’t be disappointed with yourself or too hard on yourself if you can’t create sparks,” he told them. “Especially the younger ones, because you need a little bit of strength. So don’t be hard on yourself. But the good thing is, in your group, you’ve got knowledge and you’ve got experience, and that’s what you need, because you might be good at telling jokes, or you might be good at singing a song. You might be good at shelters, you might be good at knots. But if we can come together and we can utilise all our skills, then we’ll have a successful outcome.”
“I am good at… I am good at… telling stories,” the six year old said. Gilbert did not ask him for proof.
Once the fires were lit, the kids roasted marshmallows, with mixed success. The day’s only real conflict occurred when someone dropped a marshmallow and two of them argued over whether the five-second rule had been changed to the 10-second rule for survival situations, but it petered out quickly and didn’t matter anyway because there is no rule powerful enough to keep a kid from a marshmallow.
The day’s final and biggest task was to build shelters. After a brief walk from the fire pit, the kids arrived in a clearing, where Gilbert gave them a brief tutorial:
“Humans aren’t going to survive out here long term if we haven’t got any protection from the environment,” he said. “So I’m talking about the rain, the wind, the cold, a place to sleep. And a shelter will also provide you with a sense of security because at the moment it’s pretty open and come nighttime can be quite scary.”
He spoke at length about using naturally occurring structures as foundations for their shelters, then separated them into groups and sent them off to build.
He watched one group as they walked to a place where bamboo poles had already been lashed between two pairs of adjoining trees. All it needed was a roof and maybe, if they were feeling fancy, a wall. “Look at this,” one of the parents said to another. “It’s already set up.”
One of the kids, standing right next to the structure, looked eagerly around the clearing and yelled: “We need to find a spot!”. Another member of the group yelled: “Let’s scout over there!” and together they ran off up the slope, and began to build in a place entirely devoid of pre-existing structures.
Gilbert looked on, disappointed. “Very surprised”, he said, quietly. “That’s why when you ask me about that 40 days – I can’t see it.”
One of the other groups of three quickly splintered after one of the kids went rogue and decided to build his own shelter, which anyone who has ever watched a horror movie will tell you is a bad idea.
The kids all worked diligently and the finished products weren’t terrible and some of them might even have kept water out better than an average 1990s-era Auckland home, but it was too little too late. The verdict on the chances of these kids’ surviving in the wilderness was already in and it was not a surprise.
All that remained was to navigate back to home base. It was less than 200m away and the kids had been away for less than an hour, but when Gilbert asked them to point the way, their answers covered roughly half the points of the compass.
He did not appear surprised, but he made clear what this meant for their survival chances. “If we’re going a short distance, that’s maybe not so bad,” he told them, “but over a large distance, we’re goneburgers.”
As it started to rain, he began leading them back. As they walked, he asked them to look for familiar landmarks they could use to navigate. When they didn’t seem able to locate any, he tried to prompt them:
“Were we smashing through bush?” he asked. “Were we trying to clear the bush out of the way? Did we come up a hill? Was it really dirty...”
At that point, one of the kids interrupted: “Mr SOS man! Can you please stop trying to teach us? It’s raining!”
I thought about that comment for a long time afterwards, partly because it was funny, but also because it seemed to say something important about the way children learn and adapt to their environments.
The children who survived 40 days in the Amazon did so because they had developed the requisite skills, because those were skills they needed in their everyday lives. The Kiwi kids who went on that course with Stu Gilbert in the Waitakeres had grown up in a very different environment, requiring very different skills.
The child who asked Gilbert to stop talking might not have been able to survive 40 days in the wilderness, but she did know how to deal with someone who was annoying her. The first skill might be crucial one day in her life; the second will be crucial every day of her life.
