Eldest of four siblings lost in Colombian learned survival skills from games with grandmother

The thirteen-year-old sister used the knowledge her grandmother taught her playing survival games growing up to keep her three younger siblings alive for 40 days after their plane crashed in the Colombian jungle, according to her aunt.

Lesly Mucutuy had the know-how to build a camp in the wilderness using hair ribbons for her siblings — ages 9, 5, and 1 — and even knew how to fish, hunt and find safe food from the games she and the 9-year-old would often play with their grandmother, according to a report.

“When we played, we set up like little camps,” the children’s aunt, Damaris Mucutuy, told Colombian news outlet Caracol TV.

Lesly “knew what fruits she can’t eat because there are many poisonous fruits in the forest. And she knew how to take care of a baby,” the aunt added. 

The children, who are members of the Huitoto people, were left stranded after the plane crashed on May 1, killing two others on board — including their mother, Magdalena Mucutui Valencia, who was the pilot, and an indigenous leader.

Two weeks after the crash, on May 16, a search team found the plane in a thick patch of the rainforest and recovered the bodies of the adults, but the children were nowhere to be found.

Two dogs helped 150 Colombian soldiers and others finally reach the children this week after an intensive search.

After the rescue, the children’s grandmother, Fatima Valencia, said, “I am very grateful, and to mother earth as well, that they were set free.”

During the search, rescuers had recorded Valencia reassuring the children that they would be all right if they remained in one place until rescuers arrived.

The recordings were played on loudspeakers in different parts of the rainforest during the month-long rescue operation, according to reports.

“They were raised by their grandmother,” said John Moreno, a leader of the Guanano group in Vaupes, in the southeastern part of Colombia where the children grew up. “They used what they learned in the community, relied on their ancestral knowledge in order to survive.”

The kids and their mother had taken off from the Amazonian village of Araracuara to San Jose del Guaviare to visit their father, who had been living apart from the family over the last several months after he had received death threats from FARC guerrillas in the region, according to a report.

During the flight, the Cessna single-engine propeller plane suffered an engine failure and the plane went down.

The children are recovering at a military hospital in the Colombian capital, Bogota, where they are expected to remain for up to three weeks.

On Saturday, the children were visited by Colombian president Gustavo Petro.

“The jungle saved them” Petro said. “They are children of the jungle, and now they are also children of Colombia.”

With Post Wires