Escudo de Colombia y texto de la Unidad para las Víctimas

“I want to continue sowing dreams and hopes”: Sandra’s message to the victims

At age 12, she was recruited and sexually abused. She faced the street dangers when she fled domestic abuse and she also survived a femicide attempt. Now she leads a housing project for 500 female victims.

By Willyam Peña Gutierrez

On the morning of July 18th, 2011, the doctor Harold Trujillo, a specialist in Ibague’s Federico Lleras Acosta Hospital’s ICU, asked the nurse on duty once more:

“Dis patient from 240 passed away?”

“No, she’s getting better every day,” was the nurse’s reply.

Connected to the medical gas network, to a pulse oximetry to measure the blood’s hemoglobin percentage and to an artificial respirator, Sandra Marcela Alcaceres, 31, was that patient. She had been admitted 25 days prior due to a bladed weapon attack. A wound on the left arm, other just millimeters away from the heart, and two more serious ones on the back kept her under reserved prognosis.

“In the world’s purposes, perhaps I would have died long time ago, but God had plans with me, just as He has them with any woman who sees this story,” she says ten years after the Hospital episode. Sandra uses this phrase to summarize a life marked by the pain the armed conflict left, as well as for sexual and domestic violence; but she also says this due to her forgiveness capacity, the fruit of resilience and her faith in God.

Her first years were forged in San Fernando, a village with less than 5,000 inhabitants in the Libano, Tolima, municipality; a territory influenced by the disappeared ELN´s Bolcheviques guerrilla movement. Sadness and lots of crying are her childhood memories. Her parents left her in the care of her grandmother before her second birthday along with her brother. She waited constantly for a reunion. They always told her that her parents were in Venezuela, but over time she understood why she could never meet them.

Before she was 11, and without yet having to endure the true severity of the tragedy, she was twice victim of attempted sexual abuse by close family members. “My childhood wasn’t beautiful at all. I had many painful experiences,” she recalls, although she prefers not to dwell into those episodes of forced labor, physical and psychological abuse.

Hell

She was 12 and, despite her fears, she wanted to flee from punishment and mistreatment by her family. Without knowing it, perhaps she did so as the municipality founder, General Isidro Parra: “Libano, where you are born to be free, or you die rather than be a slave.”

“In the town there was a woman who offered me to go to work in Libano. She said she would give me a life without hardships,” she recalls. They dressed her in tight clothes and the sentence came at night: “You are going to earn a living by drinking and sleeping with men.”

She fled the second time, endured hunger and cold nights sleeping in the town’s park. The winds from Nevado del Ruiz volcano, the same one that swept through Armero on November 13th, 1985, penetrated her bones and, above all, tormented her soul.

 “That was very shocking for me, because I had left home due to the abuse and then I was in the same situation,” she says.

The world refused to give her a chance. And from being drafted by a pimp, she went on to her life’s most painful experience: forced recruitment by the guerrillas. In the same park, another woman convinced her to go to work on a farm. They entered the mountain in the company of other minors. They traveled by car and then on horses. They went close to San Fernando, her homeland, but their destination was La Cuchilla, a guerrilla camp. 

“There’s the package, comrade. Enjoy, we’ll be in touch.” These words from the woman were a death sentence for Sandra. “The most difficult moments of my life began that night: I was raped by six men who were there supposedly taking care of me. I was a victim of all kinds of sexual abuse. What I did not want to do, they forced me, and in the first abuse attempt, they cut me in the lower part of the chin when I resisted,” she recalls.

Those were three months of torture and humiliation, some scars, but a wound for life. God, she assures, saved her again and placed her in that place. “I see it that way, because being there I learned the truth about my parents, the guerrilla killed them,” she says.

She fled for the third time. Ibague was her new destination. She was facing an unknown city in the middle of a terrible drama. She lived on the street again and was submitted to the abuse of people who wanted to induce her to prostitution. It was a constant struggle against adversity and death, but this time life was brewing in her womb.

“I was pregnant, and I did not know; I didn’t even know what a pregnancy was. In my house, way before, when a child was born people said the stork had arrived and that was it, they never told me about menstruation,” she explains.

Helpless, still a child in her early teens and living on the streets, Sandra gave birth to Maria Camila. With nothing but night and day, she had to give her daughter to the care of acquaintances. “I lived in Carrera 4th, where the hairdressers are, enduring hunger, thirst and cold,” she adds.

Little time went by and she lost track of Maria Camila. She never forgot about her and finding her became another mission in her life. She worked in housekeeping, met her husband when she was 15 and started a family with him. Five children arrived, she joined the Familias en Accion Program, where she was trained as a mother leader and in 2016, she created the Dreams and Hopes Foundation.

From pain to smiles 

Going from crying to smiling is not a change of mood for Sandra, it is a challenge and a testimony of overcoming. “I can say what it feels like to want to kill oneself, because sometimes I thought about it; I can say what it feels like to have nothing to eat, because I lived it; I can say what it feels like to be desperate, because I was desperate; I can tell a woman who was a victim of sexual violence what it feels like, because I was a victim of sexual violence”, she reflects.

Just like that, for no other reason than her experience, nowadays Sandra guides the female household heads that go to her foundation. “We have prevented about 50 suicides in the last few months. The solution has been to get them a job, because most of these women have needs,” she testifies.

Saving lives and making dreams happen has been the ideal, also to build an ambitious housing program for 500 female victims, most of them households heads, this is the challenge she leads now. “By doing activities and with a few savings, this year we bought a 12,000-square-meter property and we are going to build the first stage, although we need the support of the Government and private companies,” she expresses with pride and humility.

The call

She also bets on giving out her voice and story for the dignity of hurt women. She demands that businessmen and people from State learn from stories like hers and join social work.

She thanks those who have reached out to her and help her, to the Unit for the Victims for including her in the Vivificarte Emotional Repair Strategy, which contributed to her emotional recovery process and integral reparation. Above all, she thanks God because He has been her refuge and she places her actions in Him daily.

Without God, she assures, she wouldn’t have survived in the emergency room due to the domestic violence event, she wouldn’t have had the support of the guerrilla commander who helped her scape hell, and without that faith, Maria Camila would have never returned to her arms, as it happened in 2017.

“I didn’t allow myself to be defeated, I didn’t lock myself down in a hard story. Today, those marks that life left on me I use to motivate other women, to whom I say that life is beautiful, it is wonderful and that you must sow the seeds of lovely things,”, she says.

Surrounded by her six children and women who admire her, Sandra shares every moment of her amazing life; she is a leader, but above all, she is an example of resilience, therefore, she dreams, yearns and laughs.

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