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

66 OUT OF CAPTIVITYa sponge bath. All Keith could do was lie there with a perplexed lookon his face and take in just how bizarre the whole scene was. Afterwardhe came back up the hill to where I had been resting, when Urielapproached us.“How did you like that, Kees?” Uriel said, his Colombian accentdropping the th sound and making Keith’s name sound more like Kiss.“It isn’t so bad here, is it?”“Which one do you want?” another guard joined in, pushing a coupleof more young female guerrillas toward Keith. “Take this one. Orthe other one. A girl will be my gift to you.”“This is all I need,” Keith said to me, smiling as he ignored theircomments. “I’m in the middle of the jungle getting a sponge bath fromthree young women. With my luck, aerial recon got a shot of that sceneand it’ll be splashed all over the front page. Malia sees it and that’s thelast straw.”It was easy to laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation, but I coulddetect a little bit of pain seeping around the edges of his joke. As muchas we were getting to know more about the FARC, we were also gettingto know one another better. Recently Keith had told me that notlong before our crash, he and his fiancée, Malia, had just started towork their way through a pretty tough patch in their relationship. Keithwasn’t proud of what he’d done, but he’d had an affair with a Colombianflight attendant named Patricia while he was engaged to Malia.He’d confessed everything to Malia, but then learned that Patricia waspregnant with twins. He’d come completely clean and let Malia knowthat he’d screwed up and that whatever she wanted to do—leave him orwork things out—was entirely her call. She’d decided the relationshipwas worth saving. Now Keith was worried about his kids and leavingMalia at such a tough time in their relationship, but he also had theadded anxiety over being the father of yet-to-be-born twins. He saidthat he was upset with Patricia, initially thinking that she’d purposely