Where Are My Children? The True Story of a Mother Who Risked Her Life to Rescue Her Kidnapped Children

by Cassie Kimbrough

  It was worse during the day, when Federico left for his job as an assistant at an import firm. Nila was nothing if not energetic. She furiously dusted, swept, and cooked all morning long. When I pitched in to help, she'd scold me for doing it all wrong, but if I didn't offer to help, she'd scold me for my laziness. Nila and I had a few screaming matches; she would shout at me in Spanish, which I barely understood, and I would shout back at her in English, which she understood not at all. Sometimes we'd shout at the same time—after all, it didn't matter if either of us actually heard what the other was saying.

  In La Paz I saw no trace of the lifestyle Federico had described to me. There were no servants or fine cars with chauffeurs. When her husband died, Nila's standard of living fell drastically. She had to move out of their spacious apartment suite and rent it as office space. With the rental proceeds and her UN widow's pension she was buying another large condominium, but in the interim she lived in the no-frills apartment we shared with her.

  After nine miserable months, Nila traveled to West Berlin to visit one of her sons. On the eve of her departure, she held a going-away tea in her apartment. Even though I lived there, she pointedly neglected to invite me. I stayed in my room, listening to the clinking cups and laughter of Nila and her friends.

  While Nila was in Berlin, Federico and I moved into our own apartment. For me, life improved dramatically. I got a job in the evenings teaching English at a small business college. Later, I taught English to over-privileged ninth, tenth, and twelfth graders, both American and foreign, at the American Cooperative School in La Paz. Meanwhile, Federico had become the assistant manager of a textile factory. We still spent a lot of time with my in-laws, but by then I could speak decent Spanish, and the gatherings were more enjoyable. Nila and I got along better after her return from Germany.

  Federico's older brother Rene, an electrician, was forty years old and never married. He was shy and intense but very kind. Rene and Federico were Nila's children from her first husband. When Federico was still a toddler, she had married Dr. Kann and had had three more children: Edgar, Manuel and Ana Maria.

  Edgar and Manuel attended the University of Berlin and stayed in West Berlin after their graduation. Edgar was a mining engineer. He was unmarried but living with a German girl and their small daughter. Manuel was a clinical psychologist. He was married to a Peruvian woman and they had two sons.

  The youngest of Federico's siblings, and the only girl, was Ana Maria. Pretty and spoiled, Ana Maria was the only one of the children who lived with her parents during the years Dr. Kann was stationed in UN posts in Burma and Afghanistan. She had been educated in private schools and had traveled all over Europe. Besides Spanish, she spoke fluent English, German, and Farsi. She was married to a dentist, Horacio, from Buenos Aires, and they lived in La Paz with their two children. On the eve of the birth of their son, Edgar married his German girlfriend and they moved to La Paz. After a few years, Rene finally got married to Lily, a hairdresser.

  We spent time together endlessly, and I got to know my in-laws very well. Lily and Rene were always kind and generous. Rene was always running errands for his mother, and Lily spent a lot of time giving free haircuts and perms to the other women in the family. Edgar had been a radical student in Spain in the movement against Franco and had even spent time in jail there as a result of his involvement. He was still a revolutionary at heart and seemed to have genuine concern for the downtrodden. For now, though, his main concern was providing for his unhappy wife and their children. He wore a constant look of worry, and his German wife Monika lived in frustration at the difficulties of living in Bolivia and trying to learn Spanish. She and I probably would have .been better friends if we'd had a language in common.

  Ana Maria and Horacio were caught up in the social whirl of the German and Argentine Embassies. They entertained often, and their main interest was to accumulate fine and costly possessions. They could talk of little else. Horacio was a walking encyclopedia of the best brands of any product you could name, but his snobbishness annoyed me less than his habit of making jokes about my height. I towered head and shoulders above everyone in the family except Federico, and Horacio's teasing wore thin. These made up the clan, the hub around which our lives revolved for six and a half years.

  I was learning what it meant to be a housewife in Bolivia. I learned the art of haggling with surly vendors in the marketplaces. I learned how to take a twenty-pound chunk of raw meat and cut it into manageable pieces. Cooking was time consuming and labor intensive. Preparing the noon meal was the task of an entire morning. Frozen or packaged foods were nonexistent, and canned food was expensive and of inferior quality. There were peas to shell, and meat to cut and pound into tenderness. Tap water wasn't potable, so each day one had to boil a tub of water and then allow it to cool for drinking. Raw fruits and vegetables had to be soaked in iodine to kill harmful bacteria (farmers fertilized their fields with their own waste).

  There was an unwritten rule that lunch had to begin with homemade soup. This was made with stock from boiling either beef bones, or from boiling the inedible parts of a chicken: the head and the feet. I remember the first time I lifted the lid off a boiling pot in my mother-in-law's kitchen only to find the glazed eye of a chicken staring up at me, and chicken claws bobbling around in the stock. The main course was a meat dish, served up with several vegetable dishes and the obligatory rice and boiled potatoes. Dessert was fresh fruit, followed by coffee or coca tea, made from boiled leaves from the coca plant. It was an enormous amount of food.

  Breakfast was light, continental style, with bread and coffee, and instead of supper there was late afternoon tea, which consisted of more bread and coffee or tea.

  Washing clothes was a project. There were no laundromats, and a owning a washer or dryer was rare. Every house and apartment came equipped with its own laundry room: a tiny cement cubicle with a built-in washtub. Maids would stand at the washtub, rubbing and wringing the clothes by hand. The only "detergent" on the market was a soap powder that was used for everything from washing dishes to scrubbing toilets. Washed clothes were hung to dry on lines strung across the laundry room.

  Maids did the ironing, too and did they ever. I couldn't convince them that it wasn't necessary to iron everything. Bras, men's underwear, and washcloths did quite nicely without being ironed. Over the years I threw away many a dainty thing that had been scorched with a hot iron.

  Items I had always considered necessities—breakfast cereal, underarm deodorant, paper towels, and later, baby food and disposable diapers were either unavailable or prohibitively expensive. I learned to do without or to make my own. No mayonnaise? No problem. I made it at home in a blender. No baby food? I made that at home too. I learned from the Bolivians, who were wonderfully inventive at finding unusual uses for ordinary items. If what they needed wasn't at hand, they'd adapt something else to do the job.

  I learned about dealing with maids, although with limited success. When we first moved to Bolivia, I was amused at the women's complaints about the "servant problem." It was the kind of conversation I thought went the way of the English landed gentry, but there it was. At first it seemed like a wonderful convenience to have a maid to cook and clean. But I never felt comfortable dealing with a “servant.” I didn’t know how to treat a maid. Should you be all business? Should you treat them as a kind of friend? After all, they were in your house most of the time, something else I couldn’t get used to.

  But because of the lack of labor-saving devices, maids were almost a necessity. There were hardwood floors to sweep and polish, clothes to wash by hand, rugs to beat. Maids were also incredibly inexpensive—it cost the equivalent of $20 a month for a full-time, live-in housekeeper.

  Eventually I made friends with other Americans in the community. Most were with the U.S. Embassy, or the U.S. Agency for International Development, or one of the various church missions. For a while my only social life outside of Federico's family consisted in attending gringa t
eas held by American wives married to Bolivian husbands. But I didn't go for long. The teas were an excuse for wives to get together and complain about Bolivia and everything in it, and by then I was beginning to find the country fascinating.

  Physically, Bolivia was a land of contrasts. La Paz was on the flat high plains between the eastern and western ranges of the Andes Mountains. It was two miles above sea level and chilly year round. But you could hop in your car and in two hours be in the steamy Zongo Valley, where oranges grew wild and parrots squawked in the trees.

  The road led from the the icy heights of the Andean peaks into an emerald valley nestled between steep mountainsides. The first time we rounded a bend and I saw the mist rising up from the Zongo, it was like seeing the Hudson River painting "Heart of the Andes" come to life. The humid breezes of the Zongo felt like a caress against my skin, so different from the cold, dry air of La Paz.

  Two hours away from La Paz to the East lay another jungle valley with an equally exotic name, the Yungas. There the names of the towns rolled off the tongue like strange music: Chulumani, Unduavi, Socabaya. We once stayed in the Yungas in a hillside hotel nestled among orange and coffee trees and surrounded by coca fields. (Even though its, leaves are used to make cocaine, coca is grown legally in Bolivia. The Aymara, the indigenous people of the Bolivian altiplano, for centuries have chewed its leaves to alleviate fatigue and hunger. The tea brewed from its leaves was often served in both private homes and restaurants. It was also a remedy for “soroche,” or altitude sickness.) In the Yungas, we picked wild oranges—enough to fill the trunk of the car—and took them back to La Paz to distribute among the family.

  The road to the Yungas was called, among other things, El Camino de la Muerte, the Road of Death, because it is so dangerous. The Death Road is now featured regularly on TV programs as “the most dangerous road in the world.” It has even become a tourist attraction, with guided mountain bike trips offered by several adventure sports companies in La Paz.

  When I traveled on the Yungas road, it had no such international fame. It was just the scariest, most white-knuckled road trip I’d ever taken and traveling it several times only lessened the fear a little. The dirt road became slippery with mud when it rained, which was often. The mountainside rose steeply on one side of the narrow road and on the other side steep cliffs fell hundreds of feet. There were no crash barriers or shoulders. Looking over the edge, you could see the wrecks of buses and other vehicles that had slipped off the road and tumbled hundreds of feet down the mountain.

  Bolivia was full of contrasts: rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, kind and mean spirited. I had never seen so many Mercedes-Benz automobiles in one place, yet the vast majority of people had no car at all and got around on crowded buses. Beautiful mansions surrounded by well-manicured gardens could be found on the same street as mud shacks with half-naked children playing in the doorways.

  People who didn't know you could be quite rude. Customers were all but ignored by store clerks and marketplace vendors, who didn't seem to care whether you bought from them or not. But people who knew you were effusively warm and affectionate. It was the custom to greet anyone you had even a passing acquaintance with, male or female, with a kiss on both cheeks. It took me a while to get the hang of knowing which cheek to aim for first and to master the art of brushing the air with my lips without actually touching skin.

  There were other customs to get used to: the way Bolivians made promises and arranged vague social dates they had no intention of keeping, the eight o'clock dinner invitation that really meant ten-thirty, the fact that there was only one correct way to do everything—the Bolivian way.

  There was a yawning gap between the sexes, with rigidly defined roles and expectations. At parties everyone separated immediately into two groups: men and women. I soon learned that the men expected to be left alone by the women, except when the women served them. Each woman would heap a plate with the choicest bits of food and then serve it to her husband. Then the women and children would eat. The women sat on one side of the room and discussed maids, children, and manicures, and the men drank beer on the other side of the room and discussed politics.

  Once, before I understood the rules, I got bored with the women's corner and ventured onto the men's side of the room to stand at Federico's elbow. The men's discussion faltered and an embarrassed hush fell over them. It was like the scene from Giant when Elizabeth Taylor joined 75her husband and the men.

  Federico and I had our own share of problems. Almost from the moment we got married, his ardor for me seemed to cool. I was puzzled and hurt, but he denied that anything was different. In many other little ways he became less attentive. It was as if from the moment we were married he thought, "I have her now; I'll turn my attention to other things."

  And there were plenty of other things he could turn his attention to. In Austin he had been just one of the faceless crowd. In Bolivia, he was somebody. In Bolivia he was in his element, on his old stomping grounds. In Tarija he'd played on the national basketball team, and many people still remembered him as a sports star.

  In his new job he was important, too. As manager of a large textile plant, he was master of the fate of some three hundred workers. Fresh out of an American college and bursting with new ideas, he had set about modernizing the plant and introducing new management techniques. He renewed friendships with old high school buddies and every week played soccer or basketball with them. Later, he became president of Bolivia's National Basketball Association and was caught up in planning the South American Championship games, which he arranged to have in Tarija. He was often in the papers and on the news. I was glad for him and proud of his accomplishments. But few of his activities included me, and I began to feel like nothing more than a cheerleader on the sidelines.

  I was homesick. I missed my family and pets. I craved baked potatoes with sour cream, a breakfast of Grape Nuts, and an occasional enchilada. I missed Texas and all things Texan. I even missed country music, and I'd never even liked it before then. I put a travel book about Texas on our coffee table, eager to talk about home, but nobody ever asked. Bolivians seemed strangely insulated, so preoccupied with their own country and its problems that they never asked me what it was like in my country. Besides, they thought they knew all about it from the movies.

  Federico had no patience with my problems in adapting. In fact, talking about any problem was out of the question. He had a way of denying anything unpleasant as if it simply didn't exist. If he didn't like the truth, he simply made up his own truth and seemed to believe it himself. I suppose that was why he'd lied about his father. His father hadn't died; he'd deserted Nila when Federico and Rene were toddlers. He was alive and well and living in Cochabamba, Bolivia. I learned this quite by accident from one of Federico's cousins. When I asked Federico why he hadn't told me the truth, he simply shrugged. Another pointless lie came to light: Far from being a cosmopolitan world traveler, he'd never even been to Europe.

  Even though he took pride in what he considered his "modern" attitudes about women, I felt that I was a disappointment to him in ways that mattered in his society. At that time, the women in Federico’s family were judged largely by their culinary skills. Every day Nita served up enormous and delicious meals. She was known for her excellent cooking. I was only an average cook by American standards and woefully inadequate by Nila’s standards. Federico picked at the food I placed before him, yet at his mother's house he stuffed himself. Although his family was polite when we invited them to dinner, it was obvious that they considered American dishes to be substandard and my attempts at Bolivian cooking were even worse.

  Federico's family was always arguing. There'd be shouting and then a few minutes later it was as if nothing had happened. Federico took to shouting at me, even in public. This infuriated me. In my family we never shouted.

  But eventually the challenges of surviving in a country in constant turmoil overshadowed any problems in our marriage.

  On
e of the bloodiest coups d’état took place during our second year in La Paz. Army troops led by General Busch stormed the presidential palace and took over the Presidency. The elected president fled and went into hiding. A state of siege was declared. Curfew was at sunset; after that one could be shot on sight. Someone from the U.S. Embassy called to advise us to lie low for a few days. There were no flights into or out of the country, and alarmed tourists were stranded for days. There was no phone communication to the exterior, newspapers were banned, and the only news available was radio propaganda put out by the new military government.

  Those who had short-wave radios could find out what was really happening by listening to the Voice of America. The rest of us could only watch the tanks as they rumbled up the street and listen to the sounds of grenades and gunfire coming from downtown. Federico and I ventured outside only to make runs to the neighborhood store for bread and canned goods, since no fresh food or milk was being brought into town. Nervous young soldiers with automatic weapons stood on every street corner. The U.S. Embassy called a meeting at the American school to discuss evacuation plans, should they become necessary. After a few days, the new military junta surrendered against overwhelming opposition, but not until many people had lost their lives, mostly Bolivian citizens who, protesting in the streets by shouting and throwing rocks, were mowed down by tanks.

  Along with the political turmoil there was economic instability. The Bolivian peso was holding steady at 25 pesos to the dollar when we arrived in 1978, but by the time we left in 1985 the exchange rate was more than a million to one. Bolivia had the dubious distinction of having the highest inflation rate--36,000 percent--in the world. Merchants hoarded their products and refused to sell, knowing that if they waited a day or even an hour longer, prices would be even higher. Bus and taxi drivers would go on strike, demanding higher fares, and when that happened, everything shut down. One day was stranded downtown several miles from home when transportation workers announced a strike. I started walking. Even though I took off my boots after a couple of miles and trudged the rest of the way home in stockinged feet, by the time I arrived my feet were swollen to twice their size. I learned quickly that in Bolivia, politics wasn't just something you read about in the paper.