The Irish Times - Saturday, May 15, 2010
The hostage, the guerrilla and the baby born in the jungle
MARY FITZGERALD, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
Kidnapped by Farc guerillas in 2002, Clara Rojas spent six years in captivity in the Colombian jungle, where she fell out with her fellow hostages and had a son by one of her captors. But before his first birthday, the boy was taken from her. Now free and reunited with her child, she is working to rebuild both their lives
A RADIANT SMILE spreads across Clara Rojas’s face when she recalls the reason why she chose the name Emmanuel for her son. “I read in a Bible the guerrillas gave me that the word means ‘God is with us’. I felt instinctively that this should be the name of my child, because what had happened was like a miracle. Emmanuel was a miracle.”
“Miracle” is one way of describing the story of Emmanuel, born in captivity in the sweltering heat of the Colombian jungle, the result of a liaison between Rojas and one of the Farc guerrillas who had kidnapped her and her friend, Ingrid Betancourt. The boy was taken from his mother when he was just a few months short of his first birthday. In the years that passed before they saw each other again, Emmanuel was given another name by a farmer entrusted with his care. The child was to end up in a home for destitute families in the Colombian capital, Bogotá, before being traced, against all the odds, and identified through DNA tests.
It is an extraordinary story – one of which Emmanuel, now six years old, is blissfully unaware. As Rojas talks about the past, Emmanuel, dressed in a Batman T-shirt and waving a Harry Potter wand, plays in the hallway. They have come to Britain for a short holiday. Rojas plans to take her son to Oxford to show him where the Harry Potter film was shot. Emmanuel’s face lights up at the prospect.
More:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2010/0515/1224270452681.html
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