Out of Captivity : Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle

The Transition97there awhile, and the wood was showing signs of rot. When we walkedinside, there was nothing on the floor but the unevenly cut and spacedboards on which we’d have to sleep. Some other furniture, again madeout of the tablas we’d seen before, a couple of chairs, a shelf. A beam,about the size of a flagpole, ran from one end of the structure to theother.None of us wanted to think about the fact that this tin-roofed shantywas going to be our home for the foreseeable future. We all immediatelystepped back out of it onto a patio-like area in front of the chainlink.At one time the patio area (which was really just a dirt/mud areain front of the hooch) had also been fenced in. Postholes and a coupleof jagged bits of wood stuck out of the ground. I hoped that they wouldput that fence back up so that at least we could be outside if we wanted.One of the guards pointed to a tree nearby and a shelf that was nailedto it. He told us we could put cracker crumbs on the shelves and themonkeys would come to take them. We’d already seen a few monkeysrunning through our prison camp. We looked at one another. Marcshook his head and said, “Monkey Village.” The name stuck. It wasn’treally a term of endearment. At one point during the march, we’d comeacross a troop of monkeys. The FARC were as fascinated by them as wewere, but one of the guerrillas warned us to be careful. The monkeyswould fling their feces at humans and urinate on them from the treelimbs.Night was coming on fast. The Frenchman came into our hooch andtold us that he wanted the uniforms we’d been wearing. He was goingto resupply us. The most any of us got was two uniforms, a T-shirt,two pairs of underwear, two pairs of socks, one sheet, and a mosquitonet. Marc was the only one to get another T-shirt. I only had one pairof underwear because they had nothing in my size. They took away ourother clothes and we were pretty much geared up. He asked us if weneeded anything else. We told him we wanted a radio and reminded