By Joe Eskenazi,
Online News Editor, SF Weekly
The international effort made by family and friends of Gabriel Buchmann
to track down the lost Fulbright scholar in Malawi came to a somber
conclusion, as a body believed to be that of the Brazilian and French
citizen was discovered yesterday.
Malawian media quoted Ralph Makondetsa,
the public relations officer for the Mulanje police, as confirming that
a trio of locals stumbled across “the dead body of this unidentified
white man” while searching for plants that are used as brooms.
Buchmann, 28, had been missing since July 17 when he attempted to climb
Mount Mulanje alone.
The Web site run by the incoming UCLA
doctoral student's family and friends — a number of whom were on the
scene in Malawi and presumably identified the body — yesterday
confirmed that Buchmann was dead.
“It is the hour of goodbye,” reads the Portuguese-language Ajude Gabriel Buchmann
Web site. “It is with much pain that we give notice that … after 28
years of giving joy and showing the way, Gabriel departed for the
spiritual world.”
and cause of Buchmann's death have not yet been determined. He is
reportedly the second hiker to die on the mountain in the past seven
years.
Buchmann
had been on the last legs of a yearlong tour around the more
impoverished parts of the world in preparation for commencing his Ph.D
in public policy this fall. “He could have found a job in any
investment bank in Brazil or Wall Street and hit the jackpot,” his
friends and family wrote on the Web site quickly created last month
to raise funds for search parties. “He wanted to make this place a
better world, and off he went on this global trip, to get to know the
poorest countries.”
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