Family Hangs with Headhunters

Jim Rogalski stared at the seven words taunting him.

Are
You
Willing
To take
The challenge?

‘Take the challenge of a lifetime,’ the information read. ‘Forget the comforts of home
and prepare to embrace another way of life.’

Rogalski answered the call and along with wife Susana and children Taylor, Marshall
and Helen, spent nine days with a tribe of headhunters in the Malaysian jungle.
Their story was filmed by the National Geographic Channel for broadcast
in the series ‘Worlds Apart.’

The family was in the process of unpacking and settling into their new home in North
Carolina when the casting call for the National Geographic Channel caught Rogalski's attention.

The new reality series was searching for 12 American families to travel abroad for two weeks and become immersed in a foreign culture. All the while, the cameras would roll. After submitting an application and undergoing a series of interviews, the family was selected to
visit Malaysia.

‘They said to us, ‘Can you leave next week?’ says Rogalski, who spent 17 years as a journalst before heading to North Carolina. ‘We traveled together as a family to Disney World, but
never anywhere quite so exotic,’ he says.

The show follows the family on their adventure, beginning in their Chapel Hill home on the day before their trip halfway around the world.
‘I still can’t believe it,’ young Taylor says early on in the episode, spinning a big blue globe in
his hands. ‘We’re going from here,’ he says pointing to the East Coast of North America,
‘to here,’ his finger landing on Malaysia, just south of Vietnam.

‘It took 40 hours of travel time just to get there,’ remembers Taylor's dad. The trip totaled
15 days in all. ‘The first two days we stayed in the Holiday Inn in Kuching, Malaysia, to recover from the travel. It was the last time we ate well on the entire trip,’ Rogalski says.

Their destination was the state of Sarawak in East Malaysia, where the flowers can grow to
3 feet in diameter and weigh more than 25 pounds.
Two million people live in Sarawak. One-third of them belong to the Iban tribe, nomadic farming descendants of the most feared headhunting tribes on the entire island of Borneo.

In a remote Malaysian village, the show follows the Rogalskis sharing a communal longhouse with the Tinsang family of the Iban tribe. It is a culture where monkey is cooked over an open spit for dinner; where people bathe in the river. The two brothers’ American games of catch with a football were replaced with cockfighting competitions.

The shaman oversees all aspects of spiritual life.

Rogalski drew a line between the very different cultures and found common purpose.
‘I was struck with a revelation that making and offering of food to the gods is very similar
to us making an offering of money when we go to church,’ he says.
‘If you boil it down to just spirituality of human beings, I think there are more similarities between Western culture and (Malaysian) culture than there are differences.’

While Rogalski's rural Vermont upbringing and deer hunting expeditions provided some experience with nature, nothing prepared him for joining the Iban tribe hunters
with their rifles, spears and poison blow darts heading into the forests in search of wild boar, monkey and tree squirrels.

Nor was he and his family prepared to maintain a steady diet of rice, rice and more rice.

The family is shown taking long hikes, chopping down trees and pineapples for food. On one walk, Susana and daughter Helen trekked for three hours over rough terrain with other
women of the tribe to trade goods at a neighboring longhouse.

Imagine hiking uphill three miles to go grocery shopping.

In the meantime, Jim and son Marshall had a run in with a nest of stinging red ants as they were chopping down a tree for wood. Their dancing around was comical; their discomfort wasn’t.

It was their introduction into a culture where animal sacrifice is a daily ritual, often
graphically depicted as jungle drums beat in the distance.

In addition to the cultural clash, there was also the natural strain of personalities beginning to wear on each other, as newly learned tribal responsibilities were doing battle with a lifelong Western upbringing.

After the family returned from their Malaysian adventure, Rogalski says many lessons were learned.

‘It was a great benefit for the kids as well as for the adults. We got to see, up close. just how little (materially) people really need to be happy.
I learned that I am such a consumer of things - ‘gotta have this, gotta have that’ -
and it makes you think about priorities.
That saying is so true: You don’t need material things to be happy.’

Wife Susana is back at work and Rogalski is back taking care of the home and still job hunting.
Things have started to return to normal.

‘Slowly,’ says Rogalski, ‘We are starting to go back to Chinese food.’

by Thomas Dimopoulos
Originally published in The Saratogian, Nov., 2003.