Leonor: The Story of a Lost Childhood by Paula Delgado-Kling

Leonor: The Story of a Lost Childhood by Paula Delgado-Kling

I grew up in Toronto, Canada, but summers and any time off from school meant traveling back to Bogota, Colombia. My beloved grandmother and my nurturing nanny were there, and Colombia was home. Ajiaco (potato soup), obleas (waffles filled with dulce de leche), and arepas were staple foods that symbolized I was on vacation.

Entire carefree weeks were about jumping in and out of the ice cold pool at my grandmother’s house in tierra caliente and riding up and down mountains in La Sabana, atop Nabuco, the maternal black paso fino. Shortly before dusk, the sky turned the color of papaya, and it was time to go inside for family dinners and board games by the fireplace.

The nine o’clock news kept Colombia’s drug-fueled violence and politics present in our minds. I remember well when Presidential Candidate Luis Carlos Galan was fatally shot, and when the M-19, the illegal gang that the current president was once a part of, took the Palace of Justice by force and set the building on fire.

In 2001, during my graduate studies at Columbia University in New York, I heard academics and policy experts say that Colombia was not viable−it was a geopolitical risk, a failed state. What did they mean? They said women were the silent victims—how so? I first attempted to answer this in an essay for one of my classes at Columbia, and I could not find any relevant information. I reached out to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, and several local NGOs, and still, I could not find any current context. 

In 2001, I went back to Bogota to collect testimonies and to dig deep to understand my home country in intimate terms. I wrote articles for the Canadian magazine, Maclean’s, and for several newspapers. I remained intrigued.

In a government halfway home, I met Leonor, then 17 years old. Leonor is not her real name. We met merely twenty days after her departure from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the FARC, once a deadly cocaine trafficking group on the US state department’s terrorism list.

The FARC controlled the region in southern Colombia where Leonor was born, and from a young age, she joined the group out of the necessity to survive. Leonor and I kept in touch over 19 years via telephone, email, and even Facebook. Every few months, we reconnected. I found myself wanting to return to Colombia to try to see her and hear the latest in her recovery. I understood that if Leonor was able to rebuild her life, after having growing up as a child soldier and having survived sexual slavery and extrajudicial killings, then Colombia as a country could have a chance at peace.

It was important for me that a child’s, and especially a girl’s, story be given her own voice. As much as possible, the storytelling became about giving attention to a woman from southern Colombia, a region inundated by cocaine production and drug trafficking. Leonor suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder so her memory was fragmented, and I tried my best to get at the truth of what she believed her story was.

This book was not about letting a spokesperson, or a politician, take control of what is intimate to a woman like Leonor. Soon, it became evident that I needed to corroborate her story with endnotes, which can be found at the back of the book. Sadly, her life was not hard to corroborate; unfortunately, what the Kirkus Reviews calls, “a devastating portrait” is the unimaginable life of many girls.

Yet, children, and especially girls, seem to matter so little that it had been difficult to find facts for my academic paper, even if the modern Colombian conflict has been ongoing since the 1940s. 

During the process of my agent submitting the manuscript to publishers, we received feedback that I needed to streamline the work to only include Leonor’s life and exclude anything related to me. We disagreed. I am Colombian, and I had a point of view to add to the storytelling.

In 1992, my brother was kidnapped and held hostage for six months. Fortunately, he came home, and he has a happy life now. One day at the end of my yoga class, many years into writing this book, we laid in Savasana and I began to cry. I had overheard my brother tell his best friend that it was teenagers who held him hostage in a tiny room for six months. That day in yoga, I realized that I went in search of Leonor because in my mind, she was a stand-in for my brother’s captors. 

The work of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age and Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience inspired me and gave me a framework for how to report and reconstruct Leonor’s story. In LeBlanc and Malan’s writing, there is a sense of urgency to inform, while also holding the characters with compassion and empathy, which I admired.

I was lucky that Leonor was generous towards me and trusted me enough that we were able to build a rapport, maybe some kinship—even if it took a long time to cultivate. It is my wish that she approves of how I told her story. 

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About the Author

Paula Delgado-Kling holds degrees in comparative literature/French civilizations, international affairs, and creative writing from Brown University, Columbia University, and The New School, respectively. Leonor, for which she received two grants from the Canadian Council for the Arts, is her first book. Excerpts of this book have appeared in Narrative, The Literary Review, Pacifica Literary Review, and Happano.org in Japan. Born in Bogota, Colombia and raised in Toronto, Canada, Delgado-Kling now resides in New York City. To learn more, please visit PaulaDelgadoKling.com.

Leonor: The Story of a Lost Childhood

Set in the author’s homeland, Colombia, this is the heartbreaking story of Leonor, former child soldier of the FARC, a rural guerrilla group.

Paula Delgado-Kling followed Leonor for nineteen years, from shortly after she was an active member of the FARC forced into sexual slavery by a commander thirty-four years her senior, through her rehabilitation and struggle with alcohol and drug addiction, to more recent days as the mother of two girls.

Leonor’s physical beauty, together with resourcefulness and imagination in the face of horrendous circumstances, helped her carve a space for herself in a male-dominated world. She never stopped believing that she was a woman of worth and importance. It took her many years of therapy to accept that she was also a victim.

Throughout the story of Leonor, Delgado-Kling interweaves the experiences of her own family, involved with Colombian politics since the 19th century and deeply afflicted, too, by the decades of violence there.

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Category: On Writing