Child of the Jungle

Overview

An extraordinary first-person account of a childhood spent in the jungle In 1980 seven-year-old Sabine Kuegler and her family went to live in a remote jungle area of West Papua among the recently discovered Fayu—a tribe untouched by modern civilization. Her childhood was spent hunting, shooting poisonous spiders with arrows, and chewing on pieces of bat-wing in place of gum. She learned how brutal nature can be, and saw the effect of war and hatred on tribal peoples. After the death of her Fayu-brother, Ohri, Sabine decided to leave the jungle and, at 17, she went to a boarding school in Switzerland—a traumatic change for a girl who acted and felt like one of the Fayu. "Fear is something I learnt here," she says. "In the Lost Valley, with a lost tribe, I was happy. In the rest of the world it was I who was lost." Here is Sabine Kuegler's remarkable true story of a childhood lived out in the Indonesian jungle, and the struggle to conform to European society that followed.

Reviews

"Young readers, and anthropologists, too, will find this account of a most unusual childhood engrossing."  —Publishers Weekly

"Extraordinary."  —Booklist

Author Biography

Born in 1972 in Nepal, Sabine Kuegler was five when she came to live in the remote West Papuan jungle. Today she lives near Hamburg and has started up her own media company.