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

Broken Bones and Broken Bonds205Everyone rushed out to see her, and the ladies, naturally, elbowedtheir way to the front to take a look at her new child, Emanuel. Consuelowas one of the first to greet her, and her squeals of delight overseeing the baby were nice sounds to hear. We’d been surrounded bydeath and threats for so long, any sign of life was a big deal. The sea ofonlookers parted so that Clara could go to the hooch to sit down.Clara gingerly sat herself down, and beads of sweat pearled her hairline.Her skin, normally a less yellowish caramel color, was washedout and the lines around her eyes and the bags beneath them, thoughfolded over and empty, still stood out. She began her story by telling usthat she had gone to a separate section of the FARC camp.Before she could go on, the baby let out a yowl and one of the FARCguards double-timed his way toward us, a look of panic on his face.Clara clutched the baby to her chest, muffling the sound, but doingnothing to still its squirming. His arm was wrapped in a makeshiftbandage. Emanuel was a healthy-looking baby, but his arm was visiblybroken, bent at an unnatural angle and swollen. With his cries risingup, I got the sense that none of this was going smoothly.“After two weeks and no labor, they came to me to tell me that theywere going to perform a C-section. Milton, the older man, was the onewho would do the operation.”At the mere mention of his name in connection to surgery, looks ofhorror stretched across Marc’s and Tom’s faces. Milton—the guard wethought of as a mascot or as simpleminded—was one of the soldierswho’d operated on her. Taking in the sight of mother and baby, wecould see the results of Milton’s work. Whatever attempts the FARCmade to repair the damage—we could all imagine Milton simply yankingthe baby out as though tossing a vine out of the way—hadn’t beensuccessful.“By that time, I wanted the baby out of me. They gave me somekind of drug to block the pain, but I was still awake. It is all a tangle