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

¿Quién Sabe?65to type structure they’d built. After the plane was out of earshot, theyabandoned the idea of playing soldier for that day.The FARC made few allowances for gender, and physically, mostof the women shamed us. Their ability to march all day was impressive,to say the least. At one point, I asked one of the FARC women ifI could pick up her backpack to see how heavy it was. It was so loadedwith her gear and food and other supplies for the rest of the unit that Icould barely get it off the ground. Keith and I both had daughters, andwe were distressed that some of these girls seemed barely older thanKeith’s Lauren. One young woman struck us as a particularly sad case.She was no more than seventeen or eighteen, and she looked like shebelonged on a runway in Paris, not marching through the jungle with arucksack whose straps would eventually scar her like all the other menand women we’d seen.Looking at her, we all knew that her youth wasn’t going to last—notphysically and not spiritually. Many of the FARC women looked farolder than their years, and most were in relationships with men mucholder than themselves. Even in those first three weeks with the FARC,we could see that as much as the FARC preached equality—and insome ways practiced it by having the women carry heavy loads, workequally hard, and take their turns at guard duty—in many ways thewomen were sexual captives of the FARC men.The difficult position of the women became fairly clear to us as themarch progressed. The day after the group met Oscar, Sonia told Keiththat he had to bathe. She knew that with his ribs being broken and inhis poor condition, it would be difficult for him to bathe himself, so shecalled him over to her.“I have a surprise for you,” she said in a tone that none of us hadheard before. “You’re going to have a great bath.”Three female guerrillas led him down to the stream. Keith lay downon a rock and the three of them helped him strip down to his underwear.They did the same themselves and they proceeded to give him