Extraordinary story of a woman kidnapped as a child

The extraordinary story of the woman who was kidnapped as a child, left to fend for herself in the Colombian rainforest - and later married a church organist in Yorkshire.Nancy Forero Eusse’s first memory of the little girl was seeing her perched on top of a mango tree near the canal that ran past their homes in the Colombian border city of Cúcuta.“It was such a curious thing,” recalls Miss Forero Eusse, who was about five at the time. “She would hang out in that tree. Not just in the branches, but high up, right at the top.”The new arrival was as nervous as she was agile, slow to speak, and with a sadness in her eyes. She was a street child, she said, who had been taken in by a local family, only to be forced to work all day and sleep under the stove on the kitchen floor.Only after she was rescued from her abusers and adopted by the Eusse family did the girl – who thought she was about 10 years old, and asked to be called Luz Marina – begin recounting remarkable snippets about her life.“She started to talk about what had happened before,” says Miss Forero Eusse, 57. “It was incredible.”An extraordinary story slowly emerged: Marina had been abducted as a small child, then abandoned in the jungle where she lived alongside colonies of monkeys, foraging for food and sheltering in trees.Even after she was found by hunters and brought into Cúcuta, her ordeal continued. She initially lived rough in a park with other homeless children.She was then taken in by an abusive family who treated her like a slave.But her odyssey did not end with her adoption by Nancy’s family. For the little girl up the mango tree is now Marina Chapman, a Yorkshire housewife, married to a church organist, mother and grandmother, volunteer and enthusiastic cook of South American cuisine.It is an inspiring life-story but one that Mrs Chapman has long been reluctant to share beyond her closest family. She is now, however, going public with a memoir, to be published next year to raise funds for a street-children’s charity, and which has already been sold to seven countries after a scramble by publishers to obtain the rights.