Photographs, dispatches and writing by freelance journalist Corinne Purtill
Doolittle, Missouri, 2010.
Photo via Foreign Policy
Photo by Sarah Kell, courtesy of Paragraph: Workspace for Writers.
Photo credit the Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar, via the Guardian.
Photos by Maya Myers | Maya Myers Photography
London, 2010.
My friend Martha lent me her copy of Stephen King's memoir On Writing. Perhaps because of the place I was in my own work at the time, one passage in particular jumped out at me. I went to dog-ear the page (yes, in a borrowed book - in my defense, it was already a well-loved copy), and was delighted to find that, because Martha is a writer, she had dog-eared it too.
Photo of Rochom P'ngieng by the very talented Heng Sinith, copyright AP.
UPDATE: She's been found. Poor woman.
In 2007, a naked woman with matted hair crawled into an indigenous Phnong village in Ratanakiri. Her equally wild-looking male partner ran into the forest when they were spotted. As villagers gawked at the feral-seeming young woman, a couple stepped up and announced: That's our daughter.
That is how Rochom P'ngieng, or "Jungle Girl" as virtually every story has called her, began her brief appearance on the world stage. Sal Lou, the man who claimed to be her father, said that she disappeared in 1989 while herding water buffalo and had apparently survived in the wild since. After her reemergence, P'ngieng, then 28, resisted clothing and food. She was unable to speak any discernible language, communicating through grunts and points. Unsettling facts emerged - the soles of her feet were not calloused, she bore scars on her wrists that looked like she had been restrained, and who was that man with her, anyway? - and P'ngieng herself could not speak to tell her own story. Last week, after a troubled tenure in her village, P'ngieng disappeared. Her family believes she went back to the forest. The story of this young woman, whose name is likely not Rochom P'ngieng and definitely not "Jungle Girl," is a tragic one. It's also one I've been watching closely, because nearly every story about her has mentioned the family that I am writing about now. When they emerged from the forest in 2004, all of us journalists - myself included - descended to write sensational stories about the "forest people" who wore clothing made of tree bark, killed tigers for food and didn't know what a telephone was. It wasn't until I went back to them four years later, with the luxury of far more time than a reporter typically has, that I realized how off the mark we had been. Yes, to those of us who hunt for food at Gristedes and central-air our homes, it is fascinating to learn how people sustain themselves in an environment so foreign to us. But the most interesting thing I learned from the families was that it was not the separation from things that was most difficult. It was the separation from people. Of all their deprivations in their years away, none hurt as sharply as the loss of the close, interconnected villages they'd grown up in. That isolation led to some very dark moments in their time away, but never to a point of no return. Upon their return they embraced the modern world - at least, as modern as it gets in Ratanakiri - and are thriving, productive members of their community now.Their time in the forest didn't make them "forest people." They are regular people who were separated from their communities by exceptional circumstances. The things they told me changed all my ideas about what is truly important for survival. I wish that this young woman could have told her story, too.
