© Sun-Times News GroupDaniel Everett (right) first joined up with the tribe in 1977.
It was, however, Everett who was changed.
Everett, along with his wife and three children, were met in the rain forest by the Piraha people of central Brazil -- a primitive culture which has no words for numbers or colors and no concept of war or personal property. They live in the present.
For a missionary like Everett, then 26, that last part proved a stumbling block as he tried to find the language to talk about Jesus and an afterlife to people who never talk about the past nor the future.
In the end, Everett, now a linguistics professor at Illinois State University, abandoned his own religious faith, a tale he tells in his new book, Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes.
"I had preached the evidence of Christianity could be seen in the lives of the believers," Everett said Tuesday. "Then I realized, these people, were, if anything, more secure, happier."
Everett arrived in the tiny village of about 350 in 1977, charged with learning the Piraha language and creating a translation of the New Testament. With only eight consonants and three vowels, the language is one of the most difficult in the world, with meanings of words depending on changes in pitch.
Five days by boat from the nearest major city, the Piraha (pronounced pee-da-HAN) people are an isolated tribe that subsists mainly on fishing and hunting. When Everett arrived, "they just came up and started touching me and smiling and talking. I had no idea what they were saying,'' he said. He wouldn't hold his first conversation with them for months.
Life was hard. Everett hauled water to his family's thatch hut from the tea-colored Maici tributary and purified it with chlorine; still, his wife and a daughter contracted malaria. Tiny flies with V-shaped wings, called mutucas, left itching welts. And, as the book title alludes to, there were lots of snakes -- many of them venomous.
The Everett family would spend months at a time in the village until 2006. When not in the jungle, the family would often live in Sao Paulo, Brazil's biggest city, where the children would assume the western life, going to malls and movies. Inevitably returning to the Piraha, they didn't complain, said Everett. "They were all Christians and they felt this was their contribution to the work we were supposed to be doing,'' he said.
Today, Everett is worried about the Piraha. Missionaries and river traders are introducing them to western goods.
"The Piraha don't feel poor -- they feel satisfied and that's the basis of their happiness,'' said Everett. "If they start to feel a lack in their own culture, a need for western goods, that will be a very destructive force in their lives."
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