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

Broken Bones and Broken Bonds209loud as she could to her absent child. For every day of those first fewweeks after Emanuel was taken from her, it seemed like Clara was onthe edge of emotional collapse. None of us knew how to behave at thosetimes—not just toward Clara, but toward one another. After the failureof our hunger strike, we felt hopeless and incapable of doing anythingfor her. Never one of the stronger people in camp, Clara grew weakerand weaker, and it seemed to us that she was hanging on to the raggededge of our little society. Seeing her in agony raised specters of our ownissues of anxiety and loss.The pain of separation from our kids was one that the three of usknew all too well, but we couldn’t imagine what it was like for Clara toknow that her newborn child was just a few yards away. Over the courseof the next four months, the FARC would not relent and Clara and herson were essentially kept apart. We watched to see how the boy’s armwould mend, but we were all concerned that a more important bondhad been broken.TOMWhile Clara’s situation united all ten of us on certain fronts, it didn’tstop fissures from forming for all sorts of reasons. As the monthsrolled by at Caribe, we found that one of the most frequent sources ofcontention was food. If there was one thing you could always count onto sow conf lict in the group, it was food. Because the FARC had limitedsupplies most of the time, food had always been an issue for us—evenbefore we arrived at Caribe. On the occasions when there was enoughto eat, it wasn’t particularly tasty, and compared to the FARC, we wereprobably picky eaters. We knew better than they did that food didn’thave to be just rice and beans and the worst cuts of meat imaginable.When we came to the political camp, our concerns about foodshifted. It wasn’t just that we had to deal with the quality of food, wehad to deal with another issue—competition for food. At first, we’dtried to be courteous and set an example, going to the end of the line at