Gold Mine Processing Associate, Ingrid Roman, recommends Tenía Que Sobrevivir (I had to Survive) by Roberto Canessa and Pablo Vierci
Tenía Que Sobrevivir is a narrative based on a real-life event of an airplane crash in the Andes mountains. In 1972, a Uruguayan rugby team was traveling to Chile with forty-five passengers aboard when an aviation error changed the fate of the whole team.
Many died, but the remaining survivors were in the midst of nowhere with limited to no resources. To survive, they worked together and developed a society of the snow.
At the same time, their desire to live and to reunite with their families left them no other option than to seek help on their own. Among all the survivors, only Canessa and Parrado had the condition to journey out through the unknown lands of the Andes. Canessa gives his point of view of his experience in the mountains and how this influenced his future.
This book easily captures the reader’s attention because Roberto Canessa has no filters when going through his memoirs. He can engage the reader by giving great detail about the encounters he faced while he was trying to survive.
What Canessa and his friends went through pushed the limits of the human condition to unimaginable levels.
They had to readjust physically and mentally to survive. The human body demonstrates its adaptability to harsh environments even in places where life wouldn’t exist. In addition, they also had to undergo a psychological change if they wanted to make it out of the Andes mountains alive. I think this is a key element because although everything was against them they didn’t lose hope that they would return home. Even if they had doubts and fear, their willingness to live was greater.
