Going The Distance

Our hostess has asked us to give a presentation of our journey to her 10 year old daughter’s class. At one point, it was suggested that we’d be in the school’s 500 seater auditorium, but thankfully for us, it is scaled back to just one class of 30 because, inevitably, they don’t have an adaptor cable for a Mac to the projector. So every has to huddle round the computer as Mike and I burble our way through the Spanish presentation, being corrected every second sentence by a precocious girl in the front row.

From there we went into Quito to the Sol Y Vida Foundation, established 5 years earlier. Sol Y Vida is a charitable foundation which works hard to help  very poor Ecuadorean children with cancer (http://www.solyvida.info/). There is only one children’s hospital in the country, and within that, there is only one public paediatric oncologist. In public hospitals, care is free, but patients must pay for their own medication. This can run into tens of thousands of dollars in the case of cancer treatments, and the parents of these children are some of the poorest people in the country – indigenous field workers who, between them and their working wives and families, earn little more than $200 a month. Sol Y Vida works hard to get foreign donations to help pay to save the lives of these children who otherwise would die.

They have a staggering 80 children on their books. These children are referred to the foundation by the Baco Ortiz children’s hospital and arrive often believing that a cancer diagnosis is a death sentence. They meet with the foundation’s utterly wonderful psychiatrist, are evaluated, and then given both the financial and emotional support that they would otherwise never have received. The children, with their parents, often have to come from far away to receive their chemo treatments (all outpatient), some travelling up to 10 hours on public buses and horses to get to the hospital. Families often lose out on their earnings because of the time it takes to come to Quito to receive the treatment for the child. 

We meet a family whose 5 year old son, Tonio, has a tumour in his face. The family are poor, but they live in Quito. They have a 7 year old girl, Areceli, too, and the 4 of them sit on a sofa in the waiting area of the small Sol Y Vida office. We ask about their love story – the father, Jeraldo, was a teacher, and the mother, Araceli, his student. I don’t think the agegap is more than about 12 years, because the two of them still look young. Her childhood was hard, she is from an indigenous family who lived far away from Quito and worked in the fields. When she decided she wanted to go to school, she was sent to live with an aunt. It was hard, and when she walked into his classroom and first saw him, she felt a deep comfort in her heart which she hadn’t felt before – a certain, profound peace. He had noticed her (she is very pretty), and talked to his friends about her, but didn’t think that she would or could love him because he has a limp. He was wrong, she changed classes and their courtship began.

They had a lot of trouble conceiving. She was diagnosed with a tumour in her ovary, which she had removed but thought that she would never have children. When the little daughter arrived, they were elated. THeir little boy followed 2 years later. He was born with a small lump on his cheek, just below his right lip. She was concerned and went to see the doctor, who repeatedly assured her that it was fine. Only 3 years later did it start growing. Then they came into the hospital and little Tonio was diagnosed. A short while later, they went out to the country to visit the grandparents and the rest of Araceli’s family on the family farm. One day, Tonio was playing with his cousins, and managed to get hold of a machete. In a horrible accident, he cut off the ends of his third and fourth fingers. They were miles from any hospital, they had to throw away the end of the fingers – to Tonio’s horror. But really bizarrely, the ends of the two fingers have grown back. Nails and all! Little miracle fingers!

Though their experience sounds like a nightmare, they are gentle and kind. She references God a lot, and it’s clear that their faith has been a huge support throughout their son’s illness. The father talks amazingly candidly about how strongly he empathises with his son, as he was very very ill for the first few years of his life, with meningitis which left him with a badly withered leg. He can’t bear to see his son going through the same suffering. As he talks of this, he cried openly. I find it very hard not to cry during the interview. This is a family with so much love, the children are both so adorable, it is heartbreaking to hear their story. When we ask, at the end, “what is love?”, the little son, sitting on his father’s lap, says “Amor es mi pappi” – love is my daddy. At which point I start to sob.

We haul our still-sickly arses out of bed and into the Evel Knievel outfits: we’re off to be interviewed for a TV programme which airs weekly on Sunday nights in Ecuador and is one of its most watched programmes, called La Television. Our Spanish, still far from good, is getting better, so it was a laugh. We’re due to appear on the programme on Sunday 28th November so we’ll post that as soon as we have it.

We’re both struck down by Bum Wee. Today is spent mostly sleeping. Once again, Mike awakes with a black tongue (as he had in Mexico when he was last ill), but this time we get it on camera. Niiiiiiiice.

Our hostess has organised a dinner interview with one of the most prominent archaelogists in the country, and a collector of pre-Colombian art. We dine with him and our host (gingerly, on soup) and learn the background of this extraordinary country – and his extraordinary love life (just divorced his wife of 30 years – who was 22 years older than him. And that was the reason they split up: they found that the age difference when they were younger was not such a factor, they both had energy and passion. Now that he is 62 and she is 84, they are in totally different stages on life)

Ecuador is a hugely diverse country. In this one small country, they have thousands of species of frogs, more orchids than anywhere else on the planet and an unrivalled biodiversity. This comes from the geographical differences in the country. Famous for Galapagos, which is the jewel in its biological crown. But to add to that, it has coast, rainforest and mountains. Hemmed in by the Andean mountain ranges to one side, the coast on the other, it sits at the top of the cooling Humboldt current (which comes up from the south, then turns outwards to Galapagos – which is why they have penguins there) and at the bottom of the tropical Panamanian current. It has everything.

It’s cultural identity is a little confused: pre-Colombus, it was part of the Incan empire which stretched northwards from Cuzco in southern Peru, with Quito governed by the Incan kind, Atahualpa, and Cuenca by his brother (whose name I can’t remember, of course). When the Spanish came, it was part of Peru, then part of Gran Colombia (Bolivar tried to unify his native Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador) which is why they all have such similar flags (Colombia and Ecuador are the same except for the crest in the middle).

Which all contributes to a fairly profound identity crisis. A great representation of this is the Panama Hat. Product of Cuenca in Southern Ecuador, but sold through Panama of old, and thus given that name. Panama Hats are only made in Cuenca (or at least, the real deal) yet who knew?

The people from the mountains (including the Quitenos) have a strong rivalry with the people from the coast (including Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil). The costenos think the people from the mountain are dullards, the people from the mountains think the people from the coast are brash and fast-living. Even now it’s its own a country, it feels divided.

We meet up with the collective of indigenous women who are part of the Mi Mariposa sewing collective. When an order comes in, they meet at Hortensia’s house to get their orders from the efficient Hortensia, then they head back to their own houses to complete the work. One of the things that is really good about the embroidery work that these women do is that they can do it in their own homes while being mothers, wives, homemakers.

The 9 or so women sit outside Hortensia’s house, on her uneven and dusty patch of grass in front of the house, clustered around the tree roots and occasional building materials which they can sit on. They sew contentedly while children scamper about, and dogs wander in and out of their company. All are dressed with the classic hats, gold necklaces and ponchos.

The sun shines, and the view is totally magnificent. The skill of these women, their willingness to work hard, it’s been a fascinating encounter – and the Mi Mariposa products are totally gorgeous!

On the way to Quito, we cross the ecuator. 0’00 latitude. Are we really only half way through the journey?! There is a monument to it, and it’s fascinating. More on this to follow (since I was left to look after the bike and Mike spent half an hour going round the exhibit)

We head to Quito, to a suburb called Cumbaya, where we are staying with friends of Mike’s cousin’s wife. We arrive, greet the family, and within 20 minutes, the whole house is plunged into darkness.

Ecuador is largely powered hydroelectrically, and this year, the rains simply have not come in the volumes needed to meet the country’s electricity demands. Which has meant that the government has had to impose scheduled power cuts across the country. People are warned when the cuts are coming, and entire neighbourhoods plunge into darkness for 2-3 hours at a time. During the working day, places are without electricity for 6 to 7 hour blocks. Our host tells us unequivocally that the ineptitudes of the current government have played a huge part in these cuts.

A great mate of ours, Katherine, set up a business about 2 years ago called Mi Mariposa. The indigenous women of Ecaudor are reknowned for their embroidery skills, and Katherine has employed a collective to make and embroider her designs for children’s clothes. 12 women are part of this group, and they are headed up by a lady called Hortensia. We are driving to Ibarra to meet and interview Hortensia and her husband. 

La Esperanza is a village just above Ibarra, the big town. The streets of La Esperanza are cobbled and uneven, and it is populated almost entirely by indigenous families. Ladies in hats, with long dresses and shawls, and gold necklaces round their necks, wander the streets, with children in tow and babies strapped tightly to their backs. The village (and Ibarra below it) nestle in the base of a huge valley, so they are surrounded by green mountains. The earth is slightly fatter at the equator, so the tip of the snow-covered mountain we can see from our bedroom window is the furthest point from the centre of the earth, as it sits pretty much directly on the equator.

The light is perfect and clear, the temperature cool, the grass green. It’s magical. We pass a market in a small square in La Esperanza. About 15 stalls are set up, each manned by a cluster of indigenous women. The stalls are strewn with examples of the beautiful embroidery that these women do: table clothes with tightly embroidered flower patterns, matching napkins with embroidery of all colours and designs, children’s clothing, knitted jumpers, men and women’s designs. An array.

We ask for Hortensia, and are directed to a small but well turned out woman in her mid 30s. She is manning a stall of her own embroidery, and we chat. She and her husband are perfectly prepared to meet us that evening so we make arrangements. I wander the stalls as Mike films (much excitement to appear in the film, he is endlessly pulled to see this or that design at the various stalls). I look for little girls’ dresses for our various goddaughters and find some that I like.

The designs are wonderful, the little dresses are totally adorable. I’ll post a link to Mi Mariposa designs as soon as I have it! Great Christmas presents!

There’s an area in the far north of Ecuador, near the Colombian border, called El Chota. It consists of about 3 or 4 villages, very poor, inhabited by black Ecuadoreans. Women stand outside houses, washing clothes, and children and chickens run round the dusty streets.

Everyone knows everyone, there are few phones and a strong sense of community. We pull into the first village we arrive at, Carpuela, and find a smiling woman, washing, with her 3 children around her. She laughs and laughs at the sight of our bike, and even harder when we give her 3 children a ride.

The reason that we are here is that we have been told that these communities breed world-class football players. Men like Augustin Delgado and Ulises De La Cruz. The parents of whom still live in these villages, so we thought we’d hunt them out and find out a little more about these unlikely petri dishes of football talent.

For Delgado, the lady points towards Juncal, a village further back along the PanAmerican highway. When we arrive there, we ask the first family we see, all sitting out on the street in the Sunday sunshine, about where Delgado’s parents live and they say “sure! just up the road! our son will show you!” so he hops into the sidecar, I balance on the side, and we head up into the heart of the village.

“Delgado’s dad lives in that house there,” he points. Hmmm. Only his dad? “His mum lives in Ibarra” (the nearest big town) “they are separated”. D’oh! How about his brother? “Also separated”. De La Cruz? Not from this village. Anyone else? Edmundo Zura’s family lives just up the road.

Edmundo Zura plays for the Ecuadorean national team, and was a star player in the Cup of the Americas in 2007. He lives and plays in Quito at the moment, but has been playing for an Australian team, Newcastle, in the last year. Interesting.

So he guides us to Zura’s family home. A long line of people are sitting on a long step outside the house, all just hanging out together on a Sunday morning. Children immediately crowd around the bike, and we become the centre of attention. We ask about Zura’s mum and dad, who are there in the line up of family members, and they are happy to do an interview. Zura’s brother then points and says that Zura himself is just over there. And sure as hell, there is a tall, good-looking guy walking towards us, who immediately offers us juice.

And bonus! He’s married! He and his wife have come to visit for the weekend from Quito. And they’re happy to be interviewed! I love it when a plan comes together…

Nothing moves very fast here. So we don’t get down to work straight away. Edmundo wants to nip into Ibarra to get some money out, and he’s taking his dad. So they hop into an incongruously huge and blinging SUV and leave us to chat to the (huge) family. Turns out that the parents had 16 children, 12 of whom survived, and now have 30 grandchildren. All of whom want a ride on the bike. Which keeps Mike busy for the next half hour…

The place feels totally incongruous with our experience of South America. The colour, the sounds, the laughter. It feels like a little pocket of Africa in amongst the largely indigenous north of Ecuador. It’s probably a good time to talk about the inherent racism in this country, there are strict strata and it seems everyone is wary of everyone else. With the black population being very much at the bottom of them all. The black population in Ecuador are largely centred around the coastal city of Esmeralda on the coast. Legend has it that a slave ship was sinking off the coast there and the slave cargo swam to freedom and settled in that nearby town. The villages of the El Chotta area are a very rare inland offshoot of that.

We ask why the area produces such good footballers and Zura replies that it’s the perfect environment for it: the weather is great (always sunny, but not too hot), the ground is ideal (dusty but not too hard) and the kids are able to spend long hours, barefoot on the dusty terrain kicking a ball around. Add their innate physionomy to that and you have a recipe for football greatness.

Zura’s father is a farmer. The local area is hugely fertile and basically, everything grows, so there’s much to do as a farmer. He wanted Zura to follow him, but Edmundo had other ideas, being obsessed with football from the very beginning. His parents have known each other forever, both being from the same small village where they still live, so Juncal is all the family has ever known. They are Catholic and strong believers, and their family is everything to them.

Zura is 25, his wife 21 and they have been married for 8 years. They have one little dude of a son called Elkin Ronaldino. Joanna likes being the wife of a footballer (not least because his body is perfection… I lasciviously run my hand over his 6 pack like the desperate, old hag that I am), they obviously earn great money in Quito, and Elkin has a great childhood there. They come back to see the family once or twice a month. Sundays are particularly special, Joanna says, because the whole community comes together around the football field, women talking, men playing and children kicking balls around.

We’re back to driving. We want to get to Ecuador today so we spent yesterday and all of today on the road. It’s some of the most beautiful driving of our trip so far, unexpectedly verdant and hilly. The road hugs the edge of the rippling, velvety green mountains and we weave our way through the clement, almost Swiss, setting for miles.

The morning starts sadly for me. I get news that the father of one of my closest friends back in England has died. I had been struggling with uncharacterist homesickness for the couple of weeks after Costa Rica, and the thought of my dear friend going through this makes me want with all my heart to be back with her. I’m so torn, because on the one hand, I know that I’ll never have the chance to do a trip like this again and I should be relishing every minute of it; on the other hand, I long to be able to give her a huge hug, and that thought overrides the experience I’m living through. Her father was a wonderful man, a stoical, charming Brit, and a figure throughout the nearly two decades that she and I have been friends.

I spend our drive in deep thought, ruminating on the man that is now gone and what my wonderful friend is living through right now. Head in England, body in Southern Colombia. Disorientating and hard.

There’s work to be done. We come to a town, Pasto, which actually seems Swiss: nestled in a valley, surrounded by green hills and Milka cows. Sunny, but with a cool, Alpine breeze. We pull into a petrol station and make enquiries, and a local lady takes us under her wing. It turns out she is a defence lawyer in family law for the State. We have a number of errands which she helps us with (yesterday, we appeared in a surprisingly long article in the national paper El Tiempo, so we manage with her help to find a copy of that and then to laminate it – to brandish at future non-believers) We then ask her if we can interview her on the state of divorce in Colombia.

She talks about the rise in divorce in this country, the negative effect it has on children, the lack of seriousness about commitment from the start, the occurence of domestic violence and infidelity. No cold hard stats, but a very interesting interview nonetheless.

We leave Pasto, and Colombia, totally smitten. What an amazing country. The people are warm and friendly, the place works well and knows what it’s about, the world of drugs we’d heard about is so far from the truth of our experience that I want to holler from the rooftops that everyone should come to Colombia. I loved it.

Colombia loves Christmas. When we were in Bogota, there were entire neighbourhoods of Christmas decoration shops (two storey shops with everything from baubles to 10 feet Santas), and the same is true of Cali.

Cali is famous in Colombia (and beyond) for two things: cosmetic surgery and salsa. We wanted couples who represented both – I wanted to learn how surgery can change the dynamics of a relationship; and about the intensity of a couple who dance together.

When we got back from the interview with Sigifredo yesterday, we went back to our hostel, spent the usual few hours on the internet trying to follow leads for these two stories. It’s tens of phonecalls (with Mike and I bartering over who has to speak Spanish), lots of internet leads, asking people we meet for ways into the city – places to go, names they have heard of, etc. We’re still on a high from meeting Sigifredo and his wife, so we go for a celebratory pizza. Mike starts chatting to the waiter and asks about ways into the city’s vibrant salsa scene, and he brings the owner over who says that he doesn’t know about Cali’s music and dance scene, but a friend of his does. An Englishman named Will Holland, a successful “music investigator”, recording artist and DJ, who heads up a group called the Quantic Soul Orchestra. He has married a Cali girl, Ariana, and moved out here for good. One phonecall, his wife is up for it, and the interview is set.

So that’s where we start the day, with a famous English DJ and his gorgeous wife. Will is famous for his blending and experimenting with different music from around the world. He was in Cali because he was looking into the musical styles of Colombia, and had been here a few times. On the last night of one of his trips, he was talking in English at a bar, when a girl heard him talking English, was intrigued, and came over to introduce herself. Ariana meets Will. Both of them were in relationships at the time (albeit that they were a bit wobbly) so this was not a romantic meeting, simply a meeting of two people interested in the Cali salsa sounds.

The way Ariana tells it, she was with a girl friend that night at the bar. When she said to her friend that she wanted to go over and talk to the gringos, her friend refused adamantly to join her. Foreign men have a bad reputation in Cali for having flings then leaving the women behind, and the friend steadfastly refused to get involved, even catching a cab home when Ariana walked over to say hello.

Will and Ariana ended up talking, then going dancing, then Will leaving the next morning. They chatted over Skype, and with huge phonebills, over the ensuing months, and eventually ended up together. Neither was particularly keen on the idea of a long-distance relationship so one day, Will just decided to move to Cali. They married last November, like us.

I asked them about the culture clash of their relationship and how it worked. Ariana has all that sexy energy of a Cali woman: someone raised in a hot city, in a world of salsa. Will seems pretty damn British (in a “best of” way, rather than that being an insult which it can of course be). But they seem to bring out the best in each other: Will can salsa (“which is lucky!” says Ariana), Ariana is happy to travel round the world with Will’s DJing, and they speak a happy cocktail of Spanglish in their house. Will said he had to get used to the role of the huge Latin family in Ariana’s (and now his) life – coming from a small standard British family. Sunday morning salsa parties with everyone from the grandparents down to the little ones… Will is also so passionate about Colombian music that he has been able to introduce Ariana to cultures within her own country (like the Pacific coast scene) that she was unaware of. Which she loves.

Ariana says one of their strengths is that they know what they don’t like doing with the other person and are strong enough in their relationship to say it. She doesn’t like hunting for records with Will, and did it in the early days of their relationship, but now is totally happy to leave him to it.
….
Mike and I have our roles on this trip – and, since we have reached Latin America, we have both worked on the research (where I did most of it in the States). But Cali really is a triumph of Mike’s making. He did all the work for Sigifredo, he chatted to the waiter to get William & Ariana, and he is the one who suddenly receives a call from Dr Belman Galvis, one of Cali’s most famous cosmetic surgeons, at the D’Corpus clinic, to say that he’d love to meet us. Right now.

Mad dash. We’re a shambles. But Dr Galvis is all over what we are doing and has arranged – completely to our surprise – 2 couples where the woman has recently had surgery to talk about their relationships. Amazing. We shift the furniture around in the waiting room to try and make it look like home (2 different homes) and away we go.

The first couple, Bernardo and Mariamelia, have been married for more than 20 years. Over time and the birth of her two children, she started to put on weight, and she kept on putting on weight, until she didn’t really remember who she was. Her kids are in their early 20s now, and one day, she talked to her husband about the idea of surgery. He was supportive (naturally! Though it is a fair amount of money…) and was with her throughout the whole process (a tummytuck/liposuction) – from first consultation to coming round after the operation.

She looks good, there’s no question of that. When she said she was 45, I really couldn’t believe it. I thought, before they introduced themselves, that she was going to say 35. (Though she had that slight air of the Ageless Enhanced) I find this interview fascinating, if a little creepy. It’s clear that her whole life has been transformed by the surgery. She loses 20kg in one go and goes from lardy mum to hot mamma. She gets wolfwhistled in the street, she can wear nice clothes again, she feels wonderful and it shows.

When I ask her and her husband for their advice, she says that they are happier now than they have ever been before in their relationship. The sex is back (and it’s great), the kids are old enough that the two of them feel like they have fallen in love again, and they are like teenagers.

The second couple come in with their son, and the reason behind the surgery is that the woman wanted to get the same attention that she had when she was really beautiful and younger. She gingerly sits down alongside her husband and son, and they all beam with the joy that this miracle surgery has restored to their lives.

I’m going to put in my tuppence worth at this point. I am not a fan of plastic surgery in any way at all. I think it’s monumentally depressing that this is what the female gender has come to – that we’re all regressing to one ideal, that we no longer have the creativity to celebrate curves, nor the self-control to prevent curves becoming more than that. BUT there is something about the way that this woman is eulogising about how the removal of fat has transformed her life that for one nanosecond is convincing. Like a wide-eyed cult newcomer, I could see that yes, her selfesteem had been restored! Yes, her marriage was back on track! Yes, she was getting more out of life than she ever had before! But why couldn’t she have gone to a gym? And actually done some good to her body and mind? And why are the men small and ugly? Why doesn’t that matter?

One of the most interesting angles was the justification, by this fiercely religious society, for why they are allowed to tamper with what God gave them. We interviewed the doctor, and two couples, and each of them, without prompting came back with the answer that it is written in the Bible that the body is a temple – well, if the temple was crumbling, you’d want to rebuild it, wouldn’t you?
Now for the shame. And the giggles. We ask Dr Galvis to get out his black marker pen and to mark out on us what he would do if he could. I’m up first.

The black pen has rarely had such exercise. Dr Galvis starts by asking where my “areas of concern” are. I suggest that my love handles are enjoying the trip a little more than I’d like. So that’s where he and The Pen Of Shame start. He circles swathes of my flesh then loosely shades it to indicate the places where he’d suck fat from. My stomach gets a large circle round it, extending up over my non-existent 6 pack. Then he turns me round and my back is basically covered.

My arse gets a kicking too. He’d lift it up, he says, prodding away while Mike films the whole thing and (here’s my favourite bit) inject the fat he’d removed from my stomach and love handles into the upper part of the buttock. How Latin American! I’d get one of those ripe and juicy J-Lo butts.

Time to swap round. Hurray! Mike will get his time with The Pen Of Shame. He lifts his t-shirt and Dr G says “dude, you’re fine!” (I paraphrase slightly) “3 months in the gym and you’re laughing! Great bod!”. It’s difficult to describe at this point how smug the look Mike gives me is. Grrrr.

But Dr G isn’t done. He sits Mike down and says that he’d like to do a ‘little bit’ of work on Mike’s nose. Ha ha! Of course The Beak wouldn’t make it through these corporeal customs! The black pen traces its merry way down Mike’s nose (with much reference to unsightly dorsal lumps) removing about a third of its size.

Now, covered in black pen, it’s time for us to be released onto society. (I can tell you that I thought of the whole thing as a wonderful comic exercise, I was not for one second tempted to change my body in this way. A couple of months of running and gym when I get back and I plan to be back to how I know myself)
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Cali is Colombia’s southern city. It’s hot, it’s laidback, and life is good. And salsa is king. It’s everywhere. The music plays out from every home, every restaurant, every building; the word is splashed across walls, the spirit of the dance oozes from every Cali native. We ask elderly taxi drivers if they can dance “claro!” comes the reply. This is Colombia’s Salsa capital.

It is also home to one of the best salsa schools in the world: Escuela Salsa “swing Latino”. A team of about 30 people, aged from 18-30, compete internationally and regularly win everything. The big cheese couple at this school is Eduardo “El Mulatto” and his wife, Martha. 4 times world champions. They met through dance, they married, they dance together, they live below the school they run. They live for dance.

Getting an interview with them was not easy. Every minute of the day is dedicated to salsa. Eduardo was away, flying back from Bogota that evening. Martha, after over 10 phonecalls, suggested that we come down to the school and watch a rehearsal with the dancers.

Oh. My. God. Nothing I can write can do justice to the liquid hips of these 20-somethings, the precise and rapid movements all in time with each other, the confidence and raw sensuality of the dance. I sat watching, sheepishly, still covered with black marker pen will crept out from beneath my top.

Kids start dancing here in Cali as young as 2 or 3 years old. The great ones become part of the Mini-Swing team which itself is world reknowned, with 7 year old dancers taking home trophies snatched from foreign 15 year olds. We chatted to the dancers when they broke away from their strenuous practice, and they said that they live and breathe salsa. To be part of this school’s team is their life’s work – and they are prepared to sacrifice everything to remain there. They often rehearse until 2 or 3 in the morning, having started at 9 in the morning. Weekends are dance.

Interestingly, when I asked about the intimacy of dance and what kind of a relationship they had with their partners, they were adamant that it was purely platonic. It would never ever work if there was romance. Never. It would be uncomfortable and no one would ever risk their dance with a confession of attraction.

Which is why couples are rare, and great couples are rarer. The dancers all revere Eduardo. As his car pulls in eventually, a hush runs across them and they run to the balcony to watch him arrive.

I don’t really know what we are doing here. 8 members of the team is heading to Trinidad and Tabago at 4am the following morning (it’s now 10pm) to be part of a world salsa expo. Eduardo, arriving back just now, clearly has other things on his mind. We promise to be quick. And so we get a quick but great interview in their flat below the school, with their 5 year old son, a little dude called Marvin, in and out. They met through dance, and dance is their life.

When I say that the dancers in their team say that being in a couple is really hard, they agree, but say that it brings an added intensity to their salsa. It takes a lot of work though – effectively, they live and work in extremely close proximity and they have to work to make it work.

I ask Eduardo what is dance and he says immediately “love”. I then ask the 5 year old Marvin who says delightly “el baile es plata!” (dance is money). They’ve certainly done pretty well from it…!

We got a call around 11am from the assistant to Sigifredo Lopez, saying that we should go to his house immediately for an interview with him and his wife, Patricia.

Elation.

I’m very aware that this blog doesn’t – can’t – convey what we do in between driving and interviewing. It makes for dull reading, but it’s very very hard work. I mentioned briefly that in Bogota, Mike had found the name of a Colombian charity which works with kidnap victims. He wrote them a long email in Spanish, we then went to their offices to try and get a meeting with their head of marketing. Once she’s listened patiently to our story, she tentatively suggested that Sigifredo Lopez might be interested in participating, as he is familiar with the media and he is arguably Colombia’s most famous FARC kidnap victim. We left her on a high, but then heard nothing back, she phoned three days later to ask if we were with the BBC (always dubious… though we tried to pitch the idea of our film to the BBC, they weren’t interested in commissioning it – they did say come back with the finished thing, but this far from means that we are “from the BBC”), then nothing: emails bounced, phones weren’t answered, and then she was out of the office. So we went to Sigifredo’s site: www.sigifredolopez.org, on there was the name of the press contact, so we tried her, further stalling, then the 11am phonecall.

So we got an interview.

Sigifredo Lopez is from Cali, a town around 400km southwest of Bogota. He background is in law, and in 2002, he was working as a legislator for the government. It was a regular day at work when suddenly, men in army uniform ran into the building telling everyone that there was a bomb, and they needed to evacuate the place. So people filed out of the building onto a waiting bus. When the doors of the bus were closed, the “army” officers identified themselves as FARC soldiers and informed their passengers that they were being kidnapped. And so the nightmare began.

12 men were driven deep into the forest (outside its towns, Colombia is basically virtually impenetrable forest). They stayed in no one place for longer than 2 or 3 days, moving from camp to camp, intent on never being discovered by the outside world. The goverment doesn’t even know where to start in their search.

Sigifredo was a loud and disruptive captive. He made trouble for the guards, and so they took him away from the rest of the group and placed him solitary confinement: an area away from everyone else, but within the same camp. It was during this time that one of the guards heard a noise in the undergrowth, and the guards became nervous. This fear drove them to shoot the group of 11 captives. All 11 died. Sigifredo, kept away from the rest, heard the loud gunfire, but it was only weeks later that he found out that the rest of the group were no longer alive, by long-wave radio.

He was taken prisoner in 2002, and released 7 years later in February 2009. The images of his release are images of the power of human hope, and are some of the most moving and powerful I have ever seen. His two sons, who he had last seen aged 12 and 14, had grown into men in his long absence and who now hugged their father with pure joy. He has become a symbol of the fight for peace in Colombia, and now wants to run for government to take his message to the largest audience. He is also writing a book about his experience.

He still lives in Cali, with his mother, Nelly, his wife, Patricia, and his two sons, Sergio and Lucas. But now he has 3 bodyguards who go with him everywhere. We arrive at his house and are greeted by his mother. We sit and wait for something to happen. We’d been told to get there for midday, but it’s just us and his mother for 20 minutes, until his wife, Patricia arrives. 15 minutes later, Sigifredo returns. The thing that strikes me immediately is that he is just a guy. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, not least because we’d been so excited to get this interview, but he’s a guy with a warm smile, a kind air and a tendency to sit comfortably in his chair. It was a pretty powerful way to feel at the beginning of the interview. This wasn’t a Terry Waite-style strong, silent sage who has God, this was just a man, the kind of guy who it would be great to get a beer with. He’s funny, he laughs, he’s a very interesting conversationalist. It makes me feel that this could happen to anyone.

He comes in, has a lot of energy. By his own admission, he’s just excited to be alive. Deadlines, stress, nothing matters all that much to him now – he has survived hell and nothing can compare to that. We explain our project, and he starts talking, excited. He had was allowed few books in the jungle, but one of them was an English dictionary which he read in minute detail. He has a very impressive vocabulary as a result, but laments not being able to create sentences, and his accent, never having learnt to speak it.

There is some confusion on our part about lunch. Sigifredo has evidently come home for lunch, and frying sounds and smells from the kitchen make it seem like lunch is on its way. So we decide that we will wait until after lunch to do the interview. We have a great chat with Sigifredo, who talks about everything on his mind – and we’re acutely aware that we need him to save this for the actual interview.

The best way to get a great interview, we have found, is to arrive and start rapidly. People are much more candid with total strangers, bizarrely, and the energy of the act of meeting buoys the entire interview. Introductions are always filled with laughter (because of the folly of traversing the entire length of the Americas on a motorbike, voluntary MRIs, the polygamists and the porn stars that we have met, etc) which is easy to carry on into the interview. If we’re going to have a meal, we tend to have it afterwards, if at all.

Well, lunch is being prepared. Do we get 15 mins of interview, then continue after lunch, thus interrupting the flow? Or do we hold out, make small talk over lunch then do the whole thing afterwards, even though Sigifredo has to leave fairly soon after lunch? It’s a difficult one to call, but we decide to go for the latter. We have a delicious lunch with the entire family (minus one son) and the bodyguards and some friends who have wandered in, Mike and I try to keep the conversation going without exhausting interview questions, and then eventually, an hour later, we sit down to interview.

Our sadness is that the energy has changed. Everyone is in the post-lunch torpor, not helped by the intense heat of the afternoon and the broken A/C. Sigifredo’s eyes are half on the clock, and we know that we don’t have as much time as we’d like.

That said, we did get a good interview with him. Sigifredo and Patricia’s situation has to be the most intense imposed upon a couple by external factors that we have seen on this trip, if not recent global history. Patricia, over the entire 7 year period of Sigifredo’s absence, received 3 notifications that he was still alive. 2 towards the beginning, 1 later. As she recalls the time while he was away and she was left to raise her two sons, praying that he was still alive, and largely forgotten by the state, she cries.

It’s very rare that couples where one member has endured a kidnapping remain together after release. Ingrid Betancourt is no longer with her spouse, the 3 US men who were with her are no longer with their wives.

As Patricia puts it: “I’m not the same Patricia, he’s not the same Sigifredo”. They are having to get to know each other all over again. An act which takes immense patience and love. What a case study in the power of love to heal, to restore, to be worth waiting for. We leave amazed by the human spirit.