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

Reunited 333understand the Spanish-language broadcasts on the radio, we alwaysenjoyed listening to English-language stations. Enrique’s shortwave radioallowed us to pick up more English-language programming, andno matter how good we got at Spanish, it was still nice to hear our nativelanguage coming over the airwaves. With stations like the BBC andthe Voice of America, we got a different perspective on world events.Throughout our captivity, we’d picked up bits and pieces of informationabout what was happening in the larger world, but it seemed thatnews about hostages in other parts of the world always grabbed our attention.We were horrified when we found out that an American businessmanin Iraq, Nicholas Berg, had been beheaded. We rememberedthat before him, an American journalist had been kidnapped in Pakistanand suffered the same fate. As much as we were horrified by thisloss of life, such events reminded us that our situation could have beenmuch worse.The radio often gave us small pieces of information that could spurconversation for hours—even days—at a time. We were shocked tolearn that a barrel of crude oil had risen in price to $75. We took thattidbit and ran with it, expounding on our theories of geopolitics andoil and the plausibility of alternative fuels like ethanol, electricity, andhydrogen. We had seen ads for new Dell computers that at $850 weremany times more powerful than what we’d paid nearly three times asmuch for. One of the radio programs we listened to had a technologyreport and from it we learned that there was this music device called aniPod. We heard one advertisement for a car dealership offering a freepreprogrammed iPod with five thousand songs on it with the purchaseof a new car. Based on that, we began listing the songs we would put onour iPod as an exercise to get through the day.At about the same time, Marc and I started listening to a programon Colombian national radio that played all jazz and blues. I was a bigfan of the blues, not a real aficionado, but I knew what I liked. I thoughtthat Marc might get into it, and he did. We’d lie in the dark at night and