My good French-Canadian friend, Jacques, who lives in Rome, was in town today for one of his typical whirlwind tours of New York City. He's been coming here for as long as I've known him — more than 25 years now — just to suck up some energy. This time, he'd driven down from visiting in-laws in Montreal with his 9-year-old daughter, Simone, who speaks French, Italian and English.

Simone had two requests for her thirty-two hours in the city: 1. she wanted to see the American Girl Place and 2. she wanted to go to a baseball game.

I volunteered for the second watch, and Deirdre, Carrick and Pete came along. Where? Where else? Randy Johnson was on the mound and the Great Ball Orchard in the Bronx, as Art Rust, Jr. used to say, was filled and buzzing.

The last time Jacques had seen Johnson pitch was earlier this year when he was in the Congo. He'd downloaded a copy of the perfect game Johnson threw last year for the Arizona Diamondbacks and listened to it over and over on his laptop as he worked on a report, glancing at the video to catch key outs.

Jacques is the head of global issues for Caritas Internationalis, an umbrella group of Catholic relief organizations that are active throughout the world, particularly in developing nations. He is a journalist by trade, and helps to frame the issues that Caritas addresses, from unfair trade to hunger.

Last weekend, Jacques was in Bogota, where our son Duncan was born. I asked him how it had gone. One of these days, we'd like to travel back to Colombia, a beautiful country filled with generous people, but not until it's at least as safe to travel as when we were last down there in 1990. It was the height of "'The Extraditables" bombing and murder campaign against the Colombian government, but we're told things have gotten much worse since then.

"It was fine, as long as I stayed in one section of the city that's well protected," he said.

But Jacques is not one to hole up in his hotel room. He pulled out his digital camera from a bag under his seat in the upper tier of the stadium, loaded a flash memory card, and scrolled to a picture of a woman who appeared to be in her late thirties. Let's call her Lucia. Grief seemed to have been poured into her eyes. Jacques had met her in a suburb of Bogota where, he says, more than three million people are who have been displaced by the ongoing civil war are packed in squalor. It is a lawless, no-man's land, controlled in different pockets by right-wing paramilitary and in others by left-wing guerillas.

Lucia and her husband have four children between the ages of 11 and 17. A few weeks ago, they had received a note. It contained an ultimatum: Either give us money, or two of your children. Shortly after, they received a visit from a man who made the same demands, followed by another note telling them to attend a meeting at local school with some other families. jacques does not know the outcome of that meeting, but he does know this:

"They have no money. They will have to give up their two oldest children, one a boy and the other a girl. If they don't, they'll be killed."

The couple does not even know who is making the demand. It could be the right-wing paramilitary. It could be any number of left-wing guerilla groups. There are police in the area they live, but they are tied to the right wing. If Lucia and her husband were to report the incidents, they stand a 50-50 chance of getting killed.

Colombian politics is very complicated. There's no doubt, however, that drug money has played a large part in the turmoil since the 1960s. At least six percent of the economy is based on it.

No matter where people stand on the so-called War on Drugs — it's an issue I hope we can talk to each other about beyond kneejerk pronouncements — Lucia and her family are among its unsung victims.

"Is this common?" I asked.

"Yes," Jacques replied.

"Has it been written about?"

"Yes, in the Colombian press."

"So what will happen to the kids? They'll be trained to fight?"

"Yes, the boy will. He'll be sent to a different part of the country. The girl, she probably will be a sex slave."

"Why haven't I heard about this?"

He didn't answer. There is so much going on around the world that that we don't know about here. We are experts on Britney Spears and Tom Cruise and American Idols instead. Oh, and Randy Johnson.

Jacques, a huge fan of the game of baseball, was so out of touch with the sturm und drang of Major League Baseball that he thought that Johnson had just joined the Yankees last week, not last winter. I, meanwhile, prattled on about Giambi's renaissance, Cano's emergence, Sheffield's bat speed, Matsui's clutch hitting, and other chotchkas that take up space in my brain.