AOW January 30

     Mark Jenkins tells of his adventure in Papua New Guinea with the last of the Meakambut cave people.  He and his team walk into a crisis; the people are no longer fighting off cannibals or headhunters, rather diseases like malaria and tuberculosis.  One woman named Lidia is extremely ill with lungs filled with fluid.  The team became concerned with getting these sick people to a clinic. Sebastian Haraha, an ethnographer who came to pinpoint the exact locations of their caves and then register them under the National Cultural Property Act so their land will be protected, left this duty to escort the sick people.  Jenkins is offered a trip up to Kapoa Cave- the Meakambut’s most sacred.  Jenkins learned that the Meakambut people are struggling.  There are no more pigs to hunt and people are dying.  John, one of the Meakambut shares with Jenkins: "We, the Meakambut people, will give up hunting and always moving and living in the mountain caves if the government will give us a health clinic and a school, and two shovels and two axes, so we can build homes.
     Mark Jenkins is an award winning writing and adventurer, currently writing for National Geographic.  He was a global correspondent for Rodale Press.  He has written four adventure books.
     Jenkins wrote this article in response to his trip to New Guinea.
     The purpose was to show how despite the civilization of the Meakambut people is dying, they are willing to give up their nomadic lifestyle for the chance of stability. 
     The audience intended is readers of National Geographic.  
     One main rhetorical device used is narration.  Jenkins tells the story of his adventure, which makes the audience feel they’re on the adventure as well.  He uses descriptive language so that each picture he is creating through writing is vivid and captivating: “We hunch beneath a low overhang and stumble into a gantlet of skulls. Human skulls. They are lined up as though they are whispering to each other. Their craniums have turned green and their dark, haunting eye sockets stare directly at intruders.”
     The author is successful.  His article is beautiful and makes me want to find out more about the Meakambut and the ways that we can help them.


http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/02/karawari-cave-people/jenkins-text