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- Rich Enuol lived in a remote tribe in the rainforests of Vietnam before moving to the US when he was a teenager.
- Enuol's journey from Vietnam to the United States was difficult. His tribe was driven from the rainforests and was evacuated to a Cambodian refugee camp, where he learned English and experienced life with electricity for the first time.
- He now lives in Massachusetts with his wife.
- Interest in isolated, "uncontacted" tribes has risen after the American missionary John Allen Chau was killed by the Sentinelese, a tribe living on a remote Indian island.
Until he was a teenager, Rich Enuol, 32, lived in an isolated tribe in the rainforests of Vietnam. He lived without electricity, slept under a thatched roof, and had never used a flush toilet.
Today, he's in Massachusetts with his American wife, living an existence totally alien to the life he once had.
"Life was very different. There was no technology. I didn't have cell phones. I didn't have any of the skyscrapers, buildings. None of that," he told INSIDER of his childhood. "[I was] just basically living in the forest."
The rainforest was a 'paradise'
Enuol's life in the rainforests of the Vietnamese highlands was dramatically different to how he lives today.
Enuol is part of the Degar (sometimes called Montagnard) people, a collection of indigenous tribes that populated the Vietnamese Central Highlands. Once numbered in the millions, the population dwindled to the low hundreds of thousands after the Vietnam War.
Since then, the Degar community has continued to decline. Climate change, deforestation, and government-sponsored persecution have all threatened the Degar way of life. Enuol's own tribe — the Ede, or Rhade, people — and the language the group speaks, is nearly extinct.
Enuol's mother died when he was young, and he and his siblings lived with his aunt and uncle in a remote village several days' travel from other villages.
Read more: Here's what we know about the isolated tribe that reportedly killed a 26-year-old American tourist
Growing up, Enuol's tribe practiced small-scale horticulture, were hunter-gatherers, and foraged the forest's resources. Clothing was made from cotton harvested by the community.
"I remember the rainforest, being surrounded by wildlife. Monkeys, tigers, elephants, bears, snakes — you name it," he said. "We only saw tribespeople. You'd have to walk days to actually see other people."
"It's just a paradise," he said. "The rainforest was our refuge."
A way of life nearly extinct
The lives of tribes like Enuol's have become a point of fascination in recent weeks, following the death of American missionary John Allen Chau, who was killed by a remote tribe living on India's Sentinel Island. The Sentinelese have historically not been open to outsiders. The incident sparked controversy over the ethics of contacting and proselytizing to remote indigenous communities.
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Read more: More than 100 'uncontacted' tribes exist in total isolation from global society — here's what we know about them
Like the Sentinelese, the Degar people have come into contact with outsiders in several waves over the past centuries. In the 1800s and early 1900s, European Catholic and American Protestant missionaries converted remote villages to Christianity. Those religious influences were reinforced during Vietnam's French occupation, and by the large American presence in the country during the Vietnam war.
Enuol's own family converted to Christianity from a native animist faith.
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For most of his time in the jungle, Enuol says he had mostly negative experience with non-Degars. He was forced to learn Vietnamese by a wary and suspicious Vietnamese government. And sometimes outsiders would walk into his village and steal from his family, taking crops and supplies.
"There was nothing we could do about it," he said.
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"Modern" Vietnamese visitors burned down his village a number of times, he said — the community lived in tents and thatched-roof houses. Worn down from the experience, Enuol's family eventually moved out of the jungle and to a community near a Vietnamese military base. A United Nations mission later moved them to a refugee camp in Cambodia's Mondulkiri region when he was around 13.
"I started to see this oppression happen in my lifetime, during my childhood years," he said. "That land did not belong to them."
'It was like I was on a totally different planet'
It was at the Cambodian refugee camp where Enuol first learned how different life was outside the rainforest.
"It was like I was on a totally different planet. The people. The language," he said. "I was in shock about everything. From the toilets to the escalators to the planes. It was so strange."
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An American working at the camp taught Enuol English, and in 2000, he applied for political asylum in the US. He moved to Washington State, where he graduated from high school. He then attended Appalachian State University in North Carolina and gained American citizenship.
He now lives in Massachusetts with his wife and works as a site manager for a non-profit that helps people with developmental disabilities.
In 2015, thanks to a GoFundMe campaign, Enuol returned to the site where his village used to be and visited with family still living there. He was shocked to find the area completely changed, and much of the forest cleared.
"The forest where I grew up, and what I saw when I was growing up — it's not there," he said. "It's mind-blowing to see something that was so real before and then now — because of modernization, globalization, climate change happening, assimilation — we lost it."
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'Why isn't my culture good enough?'
Today, Vietnam continues to persecute the Degar people. Since 2001, around 3,000 have escaped to Cambodia (though Cambodia has in recent years refused refugees entry), and many hundreds have resettled across the US.
Despite the encroachment his tribe experienced, Enuol is judicious about the role that missionaries like John Allen Chau have played in the lives of indigenous communities.
"For indigenous people, [religious conversion] is another way to wash away our belief," he said. "When someone gives up their original faith to believe in the new faith — [it] doesn't jive well with me because I feel like, 'Why isn't my culture good enough?'"
Chau — and people like him — he believes, are simply a small symptom of the larger lack of understanding of indigenous cultures.
"Indigenous people have always been in this position, where people are interested in finding the people who lived in the rainforest, the jungle," he said. "I get that. But I don't think it's their right to come in and change someone's way of life. I didn't want to be found. If they wanted to be found, they would have been found."
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