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.