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

106 OUT OF CAPTIVITYour first home, and we’d bought it about two years before the crash. Atypical Florida Keys house, it was elevated on stilts. I had taken draftingclasses in high school, so I sketched the floor plan like it was a blueprint.I also sketched in all the furniture in each room. When I wokeup every morning, before I went to bed every night, and several timesthroughout the day, I would look at that line drawing and imagine I wasthere in my house. I would visualize what my family would be doing atthat exact moment in time.The depression that had been lingering in the shadows those firstfew weeks in Monkey Village set in after the separation. Everything wasso foreign. The food was different, the people were different, the languagewas different, being outside and subject to the whims of MotherNature was equal parts fascinating and terrifying. But of all that, notbeing able to talk to Tom and Keith was by far the hardest part. I hada difficult time communicating with the guards. The particular dialectmost of the FARC spoke only vaguely resembled the textbook SpanishI’d been learning. Ultimately it didn’t matter, since after the secondor third day of the silence, we were told that we couldn’t speak to theguards, either.The boredom became all-consuming. I could only write in my journalfor so long, could only reread what I’d read so many times. TheAM-FM radios the Frenchman had promised to us never showed up.I had twenty-four hours a day to fill up with some kind of activity, andgiven that there weren’t many activities to do, my logical choice was toshorten the day as much as I could. That meant that I would stay in bedin the morning as long as I could. We had no electricity in the camp,so the length of our day was determined by the sun. Keith and Tom gotup when the sun rose, but I frequently stayed in bed for several hoursafter that, skipping breakfast entirely. From the grumbles I heard fromTom and Keith and from what I’d experienced firsthand, I wasn’t missingmuch. Soup and an arepa—a fried bit of cornmeal—on most days.