She was born in Santiago, Chile, South America under a dictatorship. She remembers her dog, their dog. They are under the table - their mother (where is their father?), her sister, and her. There are mattresses on the table and the walls. There is a lot of noise. She hears a helicopter and machine-gun noise in the neighborhood. They don’t get out of the house. It is forbidden to go out on the street. They live in a small house with a garden.
To go eat meat at the house next door (there wasn't much food), her sister and her would walk along the wall with the help of a wooden ladder used to paint houses. She remembers that because it was a challenge to climb that ladder, she had and still has vertigo.
The grandparents’ neighborhood in the center of the city was silent, gray, and sad. Adults said, "Here, they torture.” It was a neighborhood full of grayness, cement, solids, and serious buildings. In fact, this was the neighborhood where the central dependencies of the armed forces were and are located, but she didm't know if there were clandestine houses of torture, as they were in other parts of the city.
She remembers when she started to participate in an activist group for human rights when she was 12-14. They met in the Catholic Church parishes. Adults taught them how to distribute pamphlets and other things like painting walls… Those under 18 had the possibility of not spending 5 days in prison under the no-communication regime (torture), if they were arrested for such “delinquencies” as handing out pamphlets or writing anti-government slogans on city walls.