[A thirty-seven-year-old woman with a serious demeanor, unconcerned with her appearance. She holds a rustic necklace made of colored beads.]

“I visited the Amazon jungle about ten years ago as part of an anthropological expedition.

After zigzagging up the river for a week, we crossed paths with a small nomadic tribe.

At first, we thought they were Tupinambás, but we soon concluded they were an unclassified community… so we decided to stay with them and document their culture.

It took two or three days before we started gaining their trust. Finally, one night, we were allowed to join them around the fire and witness a peculiar rite of passage.

At the beginning of the ceremony, the tribe’s shaman presented necklaces, like this one, to a group of teenagers.

Each necklace had several white beads, as many as the years that teenager had been alive.

Then the shaman gave them bags with a hundred color beads inside. He instructed them to blindly pick beads from the bags and then string them on their necklaces in that same order.

From what I was able to grasp, red beads represented prosperous years; blue, disastrous ones; green, marriage and progeny; yellow, sickness. And out of the hundred beads in the bag only one was black. It signified death and would be the last bead on the necklace.

So, for example, if a boy picked a green bead for his twentieth year… that’s when he’d presumably get married or have a child… or if he picked a black bead for his fortieth year, that’s when he’d die.

Later, the shaman told us that the necklaces were not meant to be a method of divination or as a way to predetermine the youngsters’ futures. It was just a guide, an inexact map to remind them of some milestones to come.

Still, only a few tribe’s members understood the purpose of their necklace as a symbol. Most of them believed so blindly in its power that they would end up getting married, or having kids, even dying on the year corresponding to the order of the beads.

It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?

That’s what I thought too.

Before the ceremony was over, the shaman invited me to make a necklace.

I picked the black bead for my thirty-second birthday.

I’m thirty-seven now… sometimes I feel like I’m living on borrowed time.”

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 Copyright Abel Gonzalez 2016