There won't be a word for college or professor, but I can say,

ch-au-kasei, pau-ai-se-chikapigakarakai-ba-ai,

and that just means my name is pau-ai-se,

that's my pita-han name, and I make a lot of marks on paper.

Dan Everett is a college professor, a linguist.

Often on for the past 30 years, he's lived with a tribe in the Amazon called the pita-ha.

I originally went to the pita-ha as a missionary to translate the Bible into their language,

but over the course of many years, they wound up converting me,

and I became a scientist instead, and studied their culture and its effects on their language.

The pita-ha, living huts, sleep on the ground, hunt with bows and arrows,

but what really caught Everett's attention is that they are relentlessly happy,

really happy.

This happiness and this contentment has really had a lot to do with me abandoning my religious goals

and my religion altogether, because they seem to have it a lot more together than most religious people I know.

But this isn't just another story about some far away tribe that's really happy

even though they don't have all the stuff that we have.

It's a story about something that happened during Everett's early days with the tribe.

He and his wife and their three young kids had just finished dinner.

Everett gathered about 30 pita-ha in his hut to preach to them.

I was still a very fervent Christian missionary, and I wanted to tell them how God had changed my life.

So I told them a story about my stepmother and how she had committed suicide

because she was so depressed and so lost for the word depressed, I use the word sad.

...