How Ingrid Betancourt Woke Me Up

I tend to stress out when I'm on deadline. I'll circle my room like a dog preparing to lie down, and when I finally do get down to work, it will start out feeling so arduous. But then I'll learn about someone who has done something far braver than I, something requiring much more intellect or raw individual power, someone who has faced situations more harrowing and unimaginable than those I have ever experienced, and then I'll stop circling.

One such example is an interview I heard recently with Ingrid Betancourt, the former Colombian politician who was running for president in 2002 when she was abducted by the terrorist organization the FARC. I first learned about Ms. Betancourt back in 2007, when I was working for the International Museum of Women in San Francisco. We were curating an online exhibit on Women, Power and Politics, and it was hard not to see the parallel between notable female presidential candidates in the months leading up to the 2008 election here in the States.

I remember watching a soul-wrenching documentary about Ms. Betancourt's presidential campaign, which, after she was taken away, was carried on by her then-husband. Kidnapping is such a big problem in Colombia that there are laws stating that political candidates can continue their campaigns even if they themselves cannot participate; in the case of Ms. Betancourt, her husband stepped up in her place. The documentary filmmakers had started the film before she was abducted, so it was especially tragic to see the interviews with her, bright-eyed and idealistic, in the months before her forced exile. By the time I learned who she was in 2007, she had been away for five years, which I took to mean that if she hadn't died already, she probably wouldn't survive.

And then, somewhat miraculously, she reappeared in 2008. I remember hearing the news rather off-handedly,so subtly that I thought perhaps I had made it up. But then I heard her on KQED's Forum, in an interview with Dave Iverson, talking quite earnestly about what it felt like to be captive in the jungle, struggling to hear her mother's voice over the radio airwaves. This was a woman of privilege, who during her latter year or so of captivity, was chained to a tree by her neck. And yet the honesty and emotion with which she expressed herself really woke me up.

Ms. Betancourt's experience - that was true captivity. There was no circling there. I was listening to her interview while biking to work, and by the time I got there and removed my headphones, it was as if I was aware of new sounds in the world.

There are more out there like her - maybe next time I'm stressing about a paper or a deadline I'll revisit Aung San Suu Kyi.

La Senora Presidenta

I didn't realize I'd ever meet a president, and if I did, I didn't ever think she'd be a woman.

I first learned about la senora Presidenta Michelle Bachelet, Chile's first female president and one of its most popular, while working on the Women, Power and Politics exhibit at the International Museum of Women in 2008. We were doing a segment on women as political leaders, and one of my colleagues suggested I watch La Hija del General, a documentary about Ms. Bachelet. Her father, a general in the Chilean Air Force, was arrested in 1973, and later died in prison. Michelle and her mother were also arrested and detained for several months, only to emerge, like a butterfly from a cocoon, into a life of social activism. In 2002, she became the Chilean Minister of Defense, a position that took her back to the very same military that altered the course of her parents' life. In 2006, she ran for president and won. A progressive, divorced mother with longstanding political convictions, she gave Chile a new face, only to leave it shortly before the recent earthquake.



I had all this in mind when I went to greet her for today's Forum broadcast, and yet all that came out of my mouth was some fluff about the weather. What do you say, in the five minute walk from the stairs to the studio, to convey your level of respect? Certainly you don't say something as banal as, "Oh, yes, it get so foggy here in the summer," and certainly you don't boil her tea too hot, and certainly you don't just stand there, smiling stupidly, wanting desperately to talk to her in the language you both know, the one she thinks you don't understand, wishing you could be half as eloquent and a quarter as accomplished. But she's effortlessly presidential, and you only have five minutes, and she's got a posse with her, so you talk quickly and walk fast and then, before you know it, she's lost to the airwaves and you're lost in thought, wondering, I wonder who else in this great world I might actually meet.

And realizing, of course, that it's rarely the ones you think will dazzle you that do--usually it's the ones that have been newsmakers all along, the ones that pop up on your horizon only when it's convenient to you.