Ingrid Betancourt

My interview with Ingrid Betancourt, the Colombian presidential candidate who was kidnapped by the FARC and held captive for 6 years, ran in yesterday’s Courier-Journal. She gave an exceptional interview: lucid, expressive, generous with her recollections of an unimaginably difficult ordeal. My favorite part of the interview, though, came when she talked about what happened after her rescue–she had to find a new life. She was no longer a politician, a wife, a mother of teenage kids. All the most important aspects of her identity had been taken from her by this 6 year interruption:

“Finding a new purpose in life, finding a new meaning in life, a new activity, all those thing that when you are 18 they come so easy — when you are 45 it’s not that easy.”