Review: Child of the Jungle by Sabine Kuegler. 04/11/2018

This was a fascinating adventure true story. The autobiography was written very well and the family characters were interesting along with the native tribes. When Sabine was only seven she moved with her missionary parents to Indonesian part of the New Guinea Island. Her parents were going to study tribes of the Fayu people. The area they made their home was surrounded by four different Fayu tribes that were at war with each other. Each tribe had their own territory and the Kuegler family wanted no battles with any of the tribes so they needed the tribes to accept them as friendly visitors. Their was a language barrier at first but they soon got around that with a former Fayu person who left the tribe some time earlier but was still accepted among the Fayu people.

The Kuegler family was starting from scratch because the tribes had no modern knowledge they live in a Stone Age environment but one tribe took too them almost immediately. Sabine Kuegler wrote this book about her years living in the jungle, her two siblings, friends she made, games she played with the Fayu children. She basically only knew the life in the jungle because she was very young to remember her home in Europe. As she grew older she still had a child’s behavior because it was mostly an adventure for her.

Until Sabine turned seventeen she knew nothing of cars, television, and she never knew about malls or having friends her age. She knew nothing about colors accept what she seen in the jungle and nature was her playground. The jungle was her Country and the sky was her roof. Once Sabine turned seventeen she and her parents decided sending her to a boarding school in Switzerland and she had many things to learn about being a teen socially and trying to accept modern technology. Sabine was torn between her two worlds. Before reaching the end of the book Sabine had a baby out of wedlock, than later married, got divorced, sank into depression and attempted suicide. Today Sabine is a woman who can speak several languages fluently and after several years living in Europe her soul is still pulled apart between those two worlds. Sabine planned to return to her real world, a world which for the majority of us cannot even exist…. ( )

Een 5-jarig meisje groeit op in de nabijheid bij de Fayu-stam in Papoea-Nieuw Guinea. Ze leert andere waarden en gewoonten dan de Westerse. ( )

Mädchen in andern Ländern, Kannibalenstamm in West-Papua

Miten tuntemattomasti voi tulla koti? ( )

This was a great, quick read, lots of fun. I've seen some people classifying it as children's literature; given the trouble she sometimes got into, I'm not sure a parent would want it recommended to a child . I appreciated her predicament at the end, feeling that she didn't really fit in anywhere. Looking forward to reading her sequel, though so far it's only available from library in German (a challenge?). ( )