INCREDIBLE

Rescuers Reveal Kids’ Heartbreaking First Words After Miraculous Jungle Rescue

The children survived 40 days in the wilderness.

Rescuers have recounted the moment they found four Huitoto Indigenous children who survived 40 days in the Colombian jungle after their small plane crashed. In an interview with public broadcaster RTVC on Sunday, they recalled the first words uttered by the children, aged 11 months, 4, 11, and 13. “The eldest daughter, Lesly, with the little one in her arms, ran towards me. Lesly said: ‘I’m hungry,’” Nicolas Ordonez Gomes said. “One of the two boys was lying down. He got up and said to me: ‘My mom is dead.’ We immediately followed up with positive words, saying that we were friends, that we were sent by the family, the father, the uncle. That we were family!” Rescuers had previously found the bodies of their mother, the plane’s pilot and another adult at the crash site. A video released Sunday of the rescue showed the four kids looking malnourished after spending over a month in the remote jungle. They ate cassava flour pulled from the wrecked plane before turning to foraging fruits and seeds.