Medea vs Ingrid Betancourt
The Ex Files
First of all I want to say that I appreciate all the comments I received on my last blog about anger. I know that we are all dealing with the divorce rage as best we can. Sometimes my anger can be just a blip on the radar. Other times it's all consuming, threatening to transform me into a raving Medea. She wasn't afraid to exact her revenge on her philandering husband, Jason. She helped him steal the golden fleece and he repaid her by dumping her for a princess. So she killed the kids they had together (Not something I'd recommend) poisoned his new bride, and then left in a chariot drawn by dragons. Now that's a kiss-off.
Then this morning, while I was watching the Today Show, I saw a segment on Ingrid Betancourt. And it was an interesting lesson in letting go of rage. In case you're not familiar with her harrowing story, she was a presidential candidate in Columbia, campaigning against drug trafficking (And in Columbia, that's really sticking your neck out) when she was abducted by Marxist guerrillas and held prisoner in the jungle for SIX YEARS!
According to the Guardian newspaper:
In the jungle she was often under foliage, unable to see the sky for days, or forced to march for up to 15-mile stretches, covering around 200 miles a year. She made five escape attempts during captivity, the first lasting only a few hours after realising she did not know how to cope in the jungle.
When she was caught after her last attempt she was chained by the neck and forced to stand up for three days. After that she was chained for 24 hours a day - the only woman with other prisoners, male soldiers from the Colombian army, who often had not seen women for years.
The public doesn't know the extent to which she was brutalized and tortured because she won't talk about it yet. On the Today Show she said, "I know that I have to give testimony about all the things I lived, but I need time. It's not easy to talk about things that are probably still hurting. Probably it will hurt all my life ... I hope it won't. The only thing I've settled in my mind is that I want to forgive, and forgiveness comes with forgetting."
