By JANICE ARNOLD, Staff Reporter Thursday, 06 January 2011 MONTREAL — While being held hostage for 6-1/2 years in the Amazonian jungle, Ingrid Betancourt learned that maintaining her dignity was the one freedom no one could take away from her.
Betancourt, who was running for the presidency of Colombia when she was abducted by rebel guerrillas, was the keynote speaker at the Women of Action event.
The Dec. 5 event was a fundraiser for the Israel Cancer Research Fund and the Pink Lady Fund, held at Congregation Shaar Hashomayim and attended by nearly 600 people.
Under constant armed supervision, chained by the neck to a tree and living in primitive camps, Betancourt was, nevertheless, determined “not to become who they wanted me to become.”
One day at 4 a.m., at a new camp, the guards shouted “number yourselves.” At first, Betancourt did not understand, until her fellow hostages began calling out numbers in sequence. “When it came to me, I said my name. There was silence, but the reaction of the guards was not as hard as that of my companions [all male].
“They said, ‘Who do you think you are? Do you think you are better than us, that you are a princess?’
“No, it was not because I thought I was better. But I was not going to play the game of losing my identity, of becoming an animal… The most important freedom is to choose to be the kind of person you want to be, and I was not going to be a victim. I was going to be a survivor,” but not necessarily in the physical sense.
Betancourt lived in constant fear, but its source changed over time from being afraid of being killed to losing her personal integrity.
“For me, life is a gift, but there were things more important than life,” said Betancourt, who recently published a book about her experience titled Even Silence has an End. For a long time after her release in a daring rescue in 2008 by the Colombian army, Betancourt could not speak about her ordeal.
Death no longer holds the terror it did. “I have come to the conclusion that death must be a very, very interesting experience to live,” she said. When she fell ill for six months and thought she might die in captivity, she embraced death as a welcome end.
Despite all she went through, Betancourt is able to see her captors as human beings. Most of the guards were uneducated peasants between 13 and18 years old. Her children were 13 and 16 when she had last seen them.
Although the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia called themselves Communists, these “brainwashed” teens did not know the first thing about ideology, she said, or even what a government or laws were.
If she is angry at anyone, it is the Colombian government, which Betancourt, who was a senator for the opposition party, feels abandoned her and the other hostages for far too long, refusing to meet the rebelsÂ’ demands for a prisoner exchange. By contrast, France pressed for the freedom of Betancourt who has dual Colombian-French citizenship.
There were three honorees at the fifth annual Women of Action brunch. Lydna FishmanÂ’s mother and two sisters, her only siblings, were killed in the July 5, 1970, crash of an Air Canada flight from Montreal to Los Angeles. Fishman was just 13.
This year, she published the book Repairing Rainbows, in which she candidly relates how she put her life together after that devastating loss.
Lori Weitzman was appointed a judge of Quebec CourtÂ’s criminal division in April, after serving for 23 years as a Crown prosecutor.
She paid tribute to her mother, Rhoda, for overcoming difficulty without losing her vivacity, including being widowed with a toddler at age 21. Last year, she underwent a double mastectomy, and is now supporting her older daughter – Weitzman’s sister – through her own breast cancer diagnosis.
Barry Alper also paid tribute to his life-loving late mother, Phyllis Levine, who died in 2006. Levine was a mother at 19 and had to struggle. She later became a partner of fashion designer Simon Chang, both in the business and a charitable foundation they created.
Levine recovered from a bout with ovarian cancer in 1998, but the following year was stricken with a rare disorder that robbed her of her mobility and speech, a condition she endured with courage for her remaining seven years.
Elizabeth Edwards, the originally scheduled keynote speaker, died on Dec. 7. Her husband, John Edwards, was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.
Over its five-year history, the Women of Action brunches have raised a total of $1.3 million for cancer research at Israeli institutions and for breast cancer research and equipment at the Jewish General Hospital.
Source:
No comments:
Post a Comment