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

276 OUT OF CAPTIVITYHe pressed some more. Eventually a hard marble like a ball of hardenedpus also came out.Rogelio pronounced Keith fixed. The FARC didn’t have any kind ofointments or liquids at that time, so they took the antidiarrhea medicationthey had and ground it into a powder, poured it into the wound,and slapped some tape over it. It seemed to us that Rogelio took particularpleasure in being the “popper,” and perhaps for this reason,when Marc and I developed chuchorros, we didn’t go to him. He didn’tlike either of us very much and we imagined that if he had worked sohard on Keith, he would really put it to us.During our time at the Exercise Camp, we also came into contactwith an ailment we’d encountered earlier in our captivity, somethingcalled a nuche. Again, we hadn’t heard the word before and assumedit was part of a Colombian dialect and not something we’d find in aSpanish dictionary. A nuche was like a worm or a larva that was left by acertain type of fly. Similar to the chuchorros, except it didn’t have a hardmarblelike mother as its source. We assumed that whatever caused theswelling and wound was transmitted by a fly.Nuche also produced a gunshot-type wound, around which the fleshwould swell a bit and harden into a shape like a mushroom cap. The firsttime it happened to me I assumed it was just a pimple or an ingrownhair. When it grew in size and oozed a yellowish discharge for quite awhile, I knew I had to get it checked out. This was back when we werewith Sombra, who identified it and told me that he had a jungle cure forit. He asked me if I wanted him to use it. I figured if they’d been dealingwith the problem for a while, he should know what he was doing,so I agreed to let Sombra treat me.I sat in a chair and he sat next to me, lighting a cigarette as if wewere gathered together for a chat. He took long lung-filling drags onit before exhaling into his cupped hand. He repeated that action untilthe cigarette was done and a dingy yellow smudge of nicotine was leftin the palm of his hand. He rolled that around a bit until he had made