Bittersweet Fruit

This is my story of Colombia before the rise of the drug trade and guerrilla warfare, when it was still a place of relative peace and tranquility, a lively and colorful tropical paradise to raise a family. Like my late husband would say: "In Colombia we don't get rich, but we do enjoy!" . Picturesque, was my word, but that was still the time of coffee and raw oil and just give me a guitar and let us sing together and we can joke and laugh about the situation.

As a young woman, I was eager to get out of my Finnish forests and into the big world and after a short period in USA I ended up, quite spontaneously, traveling with an older brother, in Colombia. I always wanted to write and kept notebooks and diaries, but I was too busy with my school and studies, raising my kids, working full time and was putting off my writing all the time, until now, two countries and a lifetime later, children all grown up and I realized that I was running out of time to write those books I had intended to.
Lempeät tuulet Tyyneltä mereltä (Gentle Winds From The Pacific Ocean) was my first, published in 2018 and this is a slightly modified translation, so that my own kids and grandchildren and all my family and friends across the waters can read it too.