Who Has the Right?

A young American engineer feels it may be his fault that the children in a jungle village of northeastern Peru no longer laugh and play.

They spend hours looking at a world not their own. The village headman is no longer his people's unquestioned leader. The notion of rich and poor has come to people who never knew the difference.

"...I am partly to blame, and all I did was bring the television set," Chaim Zaks said to me as we talked following an interview on his company and its work.

Zaks was born in Israel. He came to the United States and, at the time I talked to him in 1986, he worked as an engineer with Comsat, the international communications corporation. Competent, caring and conscientious, the young engineer perceived in retrospect that his work can have unexpected results.

More than a year before our talk, Zaks had journeyed to a satellite communication site near a small jungle village in northeastern Peru inhabited by a community of tree-dwelling Indians. The nearest town is about 35 kilometers away at the headwaters of the Amazon River.

The village headman was very cordial, and welcomed the young engineer. The children seemed happy and full of energy. The visitor was fascinated with the villagers' enjoyment of their simple but obviously difficult life.

"You always heard the sound of laughter," he recalled. "The children don't have manufactured rubber balls to play with. They take corn leaves and weave them over and under to form a ball. They play in mud or rain, and they have a good time."

The second time duty took him to the site, the mayor of a nearby town asked him to transport a television set to the village, and to hook it to a satellite system already in operation.

"I brought in the TV and all the children looked at it... they could not believe or understand that there are houses, because in the village everything is huts in trees, you see," he remembered. Zaks feared the TV view of the "other" world might not be a good thing for the village. He was right.

The third time he went to the village, he recalled, there were no sounds of human voices or activity.

"Everyone was watching the TV set in its shelter in the market place. The village itself had changed. As I approached through the jungle, I noticed that the path was no longer one-person wide as it had been before. On my first visit, you could pick bananas as you walked along. By the second visit, the streams of people going back and forth to the television had beaten down the undergrowth on each side.

"In the clearing the children were sitting still and silent in front of the TV. They could see Florida Channel 65. On one side of them, the children could see their huts in the jungle setting. They could see that they wore no clothes. But on the other side -- on the TV screen -- they could see the garish clothing of the Floridians and the tourists. They could compare their basic canoes with the luxury yachts in Miami. They could see 'General Hospital' with bewildering medical procedures. There are other shows which feature fighting and killing -- totally foreign to the village life.

"The children were very quiet, not running and playing... not laughing," Zaks said. The children and the TV were only part of the picture, Zaks remembered. "The village leader said to me, through my companion-interpreter; 'Before you came... you, the white man...we had one truth and that truth was mine. Everybody was happy.'"

Whites who brought change to the village, "had good motivation," in the engineer's opinion. These included not only himself, bearing the dubious marvel of television, but also a religious group from France who brought the Bible and medical care.

"Bringing medicine is good, by definition," he says. "Bringing the Bible is good, by definition. But the headman told me this has turned his problems inside out. Before the French Christians and their medicine came, there was a natural balance; there were so many who died and so many who lived. It seems so cold to me as I say this," the young man said ruefully.

Now the village is overpopulated, crowded, sometimes hungry, he said. But there is no place for the "extra" people. They cannot take a commuter train into town, even if there were a place for them outside their own village.

The headman said that the ideas in the Bible, so accepted in the "developed" world, are unsettling to his simple villagers.

"He told me, 'The Bible is full of stories about the problems between the rich and the poor. We never had a concept of rich and poor. Why do you bring us this?'"

The American says he fears that the village's society has now been totally co-opted.

"We call it developed," says Zaks.

The young American engineer surmises that he was ready to "help" the villagers because he was motivated by the urge of the "have" to help the "have-not."

Now he asks himself: Were the villagers really in need? Is it possible that what they had was much more valuable to them than what the outside world has given them?

When he first saw the villagers, he remembers, they lived hard lives, but they had things they could handle. Now they have conditions with which they cannot cope.

Even the technologically advanced share this experience to a degree, Zaks says. He points to a pile of technical periodicals, perilously close to toppling, stacked on his office bookcase. He can't possibly read them all, he explains, so he clips some essential to his field.

"I personally can't handle the developments in my own technical field," he says, "And now, I feel concern for the way my technology has affected someone else."

The young engineer wonders; should there be a limit to the spread of "development?" Is it possible to detect damage to a society in time to hold back? Who is competent to decide for someone else -- and who has the right?