Robin Flinchum, Author at Toward Freedom

Standoff in Chiapas (3/98)

Robin Flinchum June 2, 2005 Robin Flinchum

Esperanza Aguilar Jimenez is a skinny seven-year-old, all legs and arms in a well-worn, carefully patched, poofy-skirt dress. She sits next to me on a dusty rock at the side of the road leading into Morelia, her village in the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas. It’s mid-morning, and Esperanza ought to be in school. But all her teachers are gone. Fearing the imminent advance of the Mexican military, they packed themselves tightly into a little pickup and drove as quickly as they could down the deeply rutted road out of town. I know this because I watched them go. read more

Meet Lori Berenson (9/99)

Robin Flinchum June 1, 2005 Robin Flinchum

It’s 120 degrees here in the Death Valley desert, where I spend my days in a trailer pouring words into my computer, mixing them up, hoping they will come out right. Outside, the sky stretches as far as the eye can see. At night, the stars cover the world like an old soft quilt and everything is quiet, except the slithery night creatures foraging for food.

Thousands of miles away, high in the Peruvian Andes, in a concrete cell where the temperature never gets above 40 degrees, a young North American woman named Lori Berenson lies awake and watches a sliver of sky through a tiny window. I think about Lori when I look at the stars. I’d give my sky to Lori if I could – just wrap it up and sneak it through that narrow window – and hope that it would comfort her. read more

Standoff in Chiapas (3/98)

Robin Flinchum May 27, 2005 Robin Flinchum

Esperanza Aguilar Jimenez is a skinny seven-year-old, all legs and arms in a well-worn, carefully patched, poofy-skirt dress. She sits next to me on a dusty rock at the side of the road leading into Morelia, her village in the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas. It’s mid-morning, and Esperanza ought to be in school. But all her teachers are gone. Fearing the imminent advance of the Mexican military, they packed themselves tightly into a little pickup and drove as quickly as they could down the deeply rutted road out of town. I know this because I watched them go. read more