An image of Berta

We are sitting in a ground floor flat somewhere in Munich, all
attention on Berta, our guest from Honduras. Someone points
to the snow falling outside and Berta jumps up, her face
glowing with happiness. She has never seen snow and is delighted
by its gentle beauty. Her positive attitude to everything is
impressive. She explains what a pleasure it is to have
wine because she can never relax enough to take alcohol in
Honduras: she avoids complaining about the hardship there and
makes the most of her break in Europe. Her abstinence in Honduras
is linked to the last time she saw her husband. She thinks that they
had been drugged, because they did not hear the men breaking into
the house and only woke when the shooting started. Since being
tortured, her husband had never slept for more than a few moments
at a time, always being woken by nightmares. But this night they slept
soundly. Berta woke to see her husband be dragged out through
the door. The last she saw of him was a jeep speeding away into
darkness. Disappeared. Little wonder that she found it difficult
to relax in Honduras. Harder to understand is where she found the
strength to play a leading role in COFADEH, and organisation devoted
to finding the disappeared and supporting their relatives. After
years of nothing but death threats she finally got a brief
telephone call to say that her husband had died in jail.

I thought I'd start with a memory. I'm standing in the Andes, gazing
across dusty terraces. Beyond the terraces the land falls out of
sight, and rises up on the other side of the canyon into rugged
peaks. The depth of the canyon cannot be seen, but can be felt in
the thinness of the air around me, 4,000m above sea level.
Behind me are snow capped volcanoes. Snowdon, Ben Nevis and Scafell
Pike could be stacked in the canyon, one on top the other, and
they still would not interfere with the dramatic, beautiful view.
Beside me the farmer strikes the ground with his machete:
"ugly, ugly, ugly'' he says, with an intensity that burns the
scene onto my memory. I gesture feebly at the eagle circling
above us and try to suggest that we are surrounded by beauty.
We are communicating in monosyllabic spanish -- the best I can manage.
He points at sparse blades of grass poking up through the dust
and explains how hard he must toil, unlike in England, where ``you
just scatter the seed on the ground and plants sprout up''. I'm
surprised by his knowledge of England. He lives in a dry stone house
with a tin roof. I'm not really ready for this, on my first trip
out of Europe. The grinding poverty of Peru quickly dispels
any idea that we live in a civilised world. But it takes a long
time for the anything to fill the void left by the demolished myth.
The fields we stand in are watered by the remnants of an Inca
irrigation system. The enourmous mineral wealth of the country
continues to nourish the global economy, but the people
rely on the decaying remains of canals built 500 years ago for
a meagre existence. The farmer disappears briefly and reappears
with a terrified child: "take him to England'' he begs.
I mumble that I can't, and continue on my journey.