Colombie

Histoires vécues

By a Thread
I was eight years old, just home from school, and as usual my father was in the workshop below our apartment. He saw me but he didn't say anything. I went upstairs. The door to the apartment was wide open, and almost everything inside was destroyed.

The White Dress
I was five years old when the helicopters came and dropped bombs on my village. For weeks before, we had seen the copters flying high in the sky, and we used to laugh at them because they seemed so tiny and made that strange whirring noise. But no one was laughing when they came with the bombs.

Territory of Peace
When I was three years old, some men came to our house and murdered my parents and two-year-old brother. We were living in a beautiful valley in Santander in a tiny one-roomed house. I remember playing on the patio with my sisters, Sandra and Beatrid, and all around us lay fields of potatoes and corn, the forested hills and the mountains beyond.