MDC Foundation Director Challenges People To Own Their Life Story

Nelson F. Hincapie stopped believing in God when he was nine years old.

Throughout his childhood in Bogota, Colombia, Hincapie witnessed domestic abuse between his mother, Luz Maria Lopez, and father, Nelson Hincapie Lopez.

That eventually led to their divorce.

His grandmother, Ofelia, a devout Catholic, told Hincapie that if he prayed with enough faith, God would give him the family he longed to have. 

So he began waking up at 5 a.m. every day to ask God to restore his family. 

However, months later, Hincapie’s mother announced she was leaving without him to the United States. That ignited a downward spiral that, in the coming years, would include alcohol, drug and sexual abuse and depression. 

God, he believed, had failed him. 

But nearly four decades later, Hincapie testifies in his memoir, Own Your Story Before It Owns You, that God used the pain of his youth to restore him and pave a path to help hurting people.

The book was published in November. 

“It’s a story that will make you cry, it will make you laugh. [It] will make you see, and hopefully believe, there is another way,” said Hincapie, who today serves as the director of the Miami Dade College Foundation. “There’s hope and there’s light at the end of the tunnel, however big or small that tunnel may be.” 

Open Wounds 

About a year and a half after his mom left, she returned for him and his sister, Alma.  

But the victory was short lived. At Magnum Elementary School in Houston, he was bullied for not speaking English and “not being brown enough to be Mexican or white enough to be American,” he recounts in his memoir.

By the time he was 13 years old, his sixth-grade English teacher forced him to watch pornography and molested him, Hincapie said. 

Seeking to escape his pain, Hincapie turned to alcohol, marijuana, acid and sex. 

After he was caught lighting a joint in the bathroom, he was sent back to Colombia, where he attended a co-educational boarding school, El Internado, and started using cocaine. 

When he was 14, he began getting high daily and got caught hoarding a suitcase filled with empty bottles of Aguardiente and liquor.

Eventually, Hincapie was dismissed from Liceo Boston, another institution, for distributing weed. 

By the time he was 18, he was shipped back to the U.S. after stealing his dad’s company car and crashing it. 

New Beginning, Same Pain

Hincapie’s return to the U.S. in 1992 was an opportunity for a new beginning.

He earned a high school equivalency certificate in Miami and enrolled at Miami Dade College.

But after reuniting with a friend from Colombia, he slid back into old habits, failed his classes and didn’t register for the following semester. 

Hincapie’s path of self-destruction continued after he moved to Montreal in the spring of 1992 to live with his mother and her boyfriend’s family. 

Though he had periods of sobriety and attended his first Alcoholics Anonymous, he stumbled back to alcohol and drugs. 

Nearly two years later, he was arrested for the first time in Miami during Holy Thursday for driving under the influence.

Determined to finally turn his life around, Hincapie enrolled at an addiction treatment center in Jackson, Mississippi, where he began working through the painful details of his past.

However, his six-month sobriety went down the drain during a train-ride from Miami to Jacksonville, after sitting across from a man who was smoking weed. He continued in the program as if his relapse never happened, but the guilt ate him up.

After returning to Miami, the structure he had attained fell apart. However, he convinced his father to buy him a top-floor apartment in North Miami that he promised to take care of while working at a fondue restaurant nearby. 

On The Edge

Eventually, Hincapie’s vicious cycle of addiction culminated on the rooftop of his North Miami apartment on Nov. 9, 1997.

Left without money to pay his mortgage or electricity bill, he walked to the edge of the building with a friend named Camilo and prepared to jump off. 

“God saved me,” Hincapie recounts. “Camilo said, ‘Let’s get off the ledge,’ but I think Camilo was divinely inspired to say that.”

Hincapie, with his family’s support, once again sought help.

His mother contacted Omar Mejia, the director of a treatment program who used the hotel she managed in Miami Beach as a halfway house for recovering addicts. 

Hincapie had a breakthrough. He started coming to grips with his past, realizing his addictions stemmed from a need to be loved.

“My story had always been ‘my parents got divorced,’ but there was more to it,” Hincapie said. “The devil’s in the details. It wasn’t until somebody caring, loving and compassionate asked me, ‘Did your parents get divorced or did your mom abandon you?’ that things started changing.”

Eventually, Hincapie landed a temporary job for the Americas Group within First Union Bank near Wolfson Campus. That inspired him to go back to school at the age of 24.

He earned his associate’s degree in psychology from the Honors Program at MDC in 2002 and his bachelor’s in public administration from Florida International University in 2004.

While he was pursuing higher education, he met Karolina, who he describes as “organized,” “coherent” and “the best thing that ever happened to [him].” She would become his wife and spiritual rock. 

They have four children—Sarah Luna, Simon Lorenzo, Samuel Luciano and Salome Lucia.

“He let God love him to the point that he was able to move forward with his professional life,” said Karolina Hincapie. “He was able to get married, he was able to have kids, he was able to fulfill a well-rounded life.” 

In 2009, Hincapie started a 12-year run as president and CEO of Voices For Children Foundation, a non-profit organization that helps the children and youth in the Miami-Dade County foster care system.

By January of 2022, Hincapie was tabbed as CEO of the Miami Dade College Foundation. He is charged with finding donors to support scholarships that help students reach their dreams. 

Writing the Book

Although he had thought about sharing his story on paper before, inspiration to finally do it came after hearing the gospel hymn In The Time That You Gave Me by Bradley Walker. The song talks about taking full advantage of the time God gives you on earth.   

In 2022, Hincapie committed two weeks to writing and produced a rough draft of 200 pages. 

The final product is 124 pages and took nearly nine months to edit. Hincapie self-published it on Amazon Kindle; it will soon be available on Audible and translated into Spanish. 

The book, written four decades after his wild odyssey started, proved to him that God does answer prayers— in his own time. 

“I don’t need to numb the pain anymore. As a matter of fact, I don’t have the pain anymore,” Hincapie said. “I’m able to pray for the people that have hurt me and I’ve been able to forgive. And that doesn’t come from me; only through the grace of God [am I] able to forgive.”

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