Bogota ‘rat lady’ plucked from trash, solitude (PHOTOS)

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When the time came, it was a tunnel that led authorities to the den of rat-infested trash, the humble abode Ernestina Martinez called home.

The 78-year-old woman, a marvelous collector of trash who had become something of a pied-piper for neighborhood rats, was told by authorities that she had to leave.

Local media reported that when authorities arrived in the summer of 2009 they told her, “You live in very unhealthy conditions. These animals can cause infections.” Ernestina allegedly glanced at them and shouted, “Enter!” and the police, in awe, watched how the rats obediently came scurrying up to her.

“She said that if you took away the trash she would die, because she had lived [there] for 25 years,” reflected one of Ernestina’s neighbors.

Living amongst the rats had become a way of life for Ernestina. They were her pets.

Though after hearing the pleas of the local mayor from outside her den on January 12 of this year, Ernestina came out with a candle and a box of matches. She wore a long skirt, a stained blouse, and two different colored shoes.

“I’m alone like a dog,” she supposedly said to him.

Whether she willed it or not, any sense of solitude the old woman possessed was gone. She was immediately rushed to the psychiatric hospital Simon Bolivar after her blood pressure was read.

Doctors claim that she suffers from schizophrenia. But for Bogota, whose own mayor has been up to his neck in how to solve the city’s trash problem, it is important to ask just how crazy Doña Ernestina and her acceptance of a life brimming with trash really is.