Miguel is the first member of his 30,000-strong semi- nomadic tribe ever to leave the Amazon jungle to study abroad. He was alerted to the showy of the world outside his remote village by a National Geographic magazine left in the rainforest by a missionary. Miguel was 13. The magazine pictures of New York skyscrapers and images of life in the West fascinated him and launched him on an incredible voyage of discovery. A keen musician, Miguel said, ‘It made me realize there was a whole new world outside that I wanted to see with my own eyes’.

So he set off on a four-day boat journey to the jungle city of Pucallopa to find a school. From there he travelled to Peru’s capital, Lima, where missionaries helped him study. Ironically, he was given the name Manenima – he who travels – because his mother gave birth to him in a canoe as she moved from village to village. Miguel’s determination to broaden his horizons in Lima left him doing his homework under streetlights and living on leftover food from restaurants, but it also won him a scholarship to travel and study in Texas where he met Kim. Now he is married to Kim and they have a four-year-old daughter, Vanessa.

  

When Miguel first arrived in the USA he was staggered by the culture clash. His diet had consisted of monkeys, armadillos, fish and alligators so when he was first offered a dish of lettuce he was disgusted. Money was another source of fascination; with no form of currency, his tribe had relied on barter for trading. Now life has taken another dramatic turn as Miguel takes up his one-year scholarship at Mansfield College, Oxford. His fellow students will no doubt be fascinated to learn about Miguel’s childhood in the rainforests; his college digs a far cry from the palm-leaf hut where he grew up in the Peruvian jungle. And what does Miguel think about all this? In his words: “It’s a dream come true for anyone but for someone from the Amazonian rainforest it’s a chance in five million”.

What is the meaning of Miguel’s name – Manenima?