In the Presence of My Enemies (24 page)

“I don’t know. But I have to move in with him tonight. I just don’t know what to do about it.”

“Sheila, I am so sorry,” I said. “I suppose you have to do what they tell you to do. But if I can help you, I will.”

* * *

A few nights later, as we were walking in absolute darkness, Martin and I were allowed to proceed without a guard for a change. I was hanging on to his shirt so I wouldn’t get lost. The artillery kept getting closer and closer. I was praying out loud, “O God, save us. O Lord, keep us safe. Please keep us safe. Don’t let bombs hit us. Lord, keep us safe. O God, help us,” over and over. I know Jesus talked about not needing to babble on and on, repeating yourself in prayer. But I couldn’t help it. I was just too strung out.

On another night we walked until three-thirty in the morning. Totally exhausted, we lay down in a field. All of a sudden there was a big thump, like an artillery shell, but close. Suddenly the sky lit up with a bright light, and then a parachute opened up as a light floated to the ground right near us. Anyone watching could have seen our whole group.

“Oh, no, they found us!” Martin said, leaning toward me. “They’re just confirming that we are here.”

But we were so tired that we just lay there. Early the next morning, we heard the rumble of what are called “6 by 6s ”—huge trucks with flatbeds on the back. These were full of soldiers. We got up and began moving out of this sheltered area toward a big field in a valley. Within minutes we heard somebody yell, “There they are! Hoy! It’s Abu Sayyaf!” The guns started blasting.

Well, this is it,
I thought as we ran and dropped, ran and dropped. Assad, the guard assigned to us, was handcuffed to Martin. They began running straight for a tree—and I saw what was going to happen, like it was in slow motion. Sure enough, Assad headed for one side of the tree and Martin the other.

“Stop!” I yelled. Just then they hit that tree. Both of them went flying.

Assad’s side of the handcuffs (the rusted side) came off, of course, but still left a huge gash on his wrist. Martin badly wrenched his shoulder. They both just lay there for a minute.

Sabaya came running up and said, “What! What! Are you trying to escape?” He began chewing Martin out right in the middle of the battle.

Martin answered, “Sabaya, calm down. We are with you. We are not trying to go anywhere. We just had an accident. We are with you. We are with you. Don’t worry about us.”

They quickly put the handcuffs back on, still not realizing that they were rusted. Martin shot me a look, and I breathed a quick prayer of thanks to God. Soon we resumed running, as bullets kept whizzing past our heads. We eventually got into some woods. Along the way I lost my black
terong,
which had always been so hot and oppressive. I thought,
Yes! Finally I can start wearing something else on my head.
I really hated that thing.

Once again, the AFP didn’t actually pursue us. We walked less than an hour and stopped to set up camp. By now the exhaustion and fear were nearly more than I could take. I sat just bawling my eyes out along the trail, with my legs pulled up and my arms around my knees, sobbing.

Angie came up to me and blithely said, “Gracia, what’s wrong?”

How can she ask that after we’ve just been through a horrible battle?
I thought to myself. At that moment, I’m afraid
Gracia
didn’t respond very
graciously.
I looked at her and said in a snippy tone, “Nothing’s wrong, Angie. Everything is fine. It is just such a beautiful day. There’s nothing to worry about, no reason to cry.” Angie looked surprised, then sat down quietly beside me.

The next day, Martin was asked to write a letter to an AFP colonel that would be read over Radyo Agong. It said, in essence, “Please negotiate for us, because even if you kill some of these Abu Sayyaf in battle, you are not going to kill them all. With God as my witness—and I have been a witness here during this whole thing from our capture last May until now in October—only nine have died. It is not the big numbers that you are publishing.”

We had heard on the radio that the AFP claimed to have killed twenty-three Abu Sayyaf back when they called in the A-10s to bomb us. That made no sense from our vantage point; there weren’t more than ten or twelve Abu Sayyaf to target in that particular place and only one of those was hit. What really happened, I heard, is that the AFP ended up bombing their own people on the ground, so that there very well may have been twenty-three casualties, but twenty-two were caused by friendly fire.

“Even if you do kill off all these Abu Sayyaf around us,” Martin concluded, “there are lots more, and they cycle in and out. They go on a break, and then they return. So we must get down to negotiations in order to solve this problem.”

* * *

Soon after that, the three remaining Filipino women in our hostage group had their own crisis to face. It was announced that all three would be
sabaya
ed.

Musab had chosen Ediborah.

Moghira, a leader in charge of the “blocking group” that brought up the rear whenever we mobiled, had chosen Fe.

And Sabaya had chosen Angie.

All three of these men were already married, of course. Musab had two wives and Sabaya had three, although he had recently divorced one of them. But that didn’t seem to limit the men’s appetites for current companionship.

The girls were all so upset. Angie’s and Fe’s ransoms had already been paid. Ediborah, meanwhile, was a married woman (as Sheila was). What a horrible thing this was for them. We had prayed and begged God not to let this happen. Yet here it was. I could not understand God’s way in this. I was just sick.

When the time came to move, Fe sat holding on to me and saying, “I’m just not going to go. I’m going to stay here with you.”

“Yes, Fe, you can do that,” I replied.

Soon one of the guys came and told her to move over to Moghira’s place.

“No, I’m not going to go.”

The guy took the message back, then returned to say, “Well, he just wants to talk to you.”

So she went. She begged Moghira, “Let me stay with the Burnhams tonight up in the house—please, please!”

Soon she was back all excited. “He said I can stay with you! I don’t have to go with him.”

But in a few minutes, the messenger was back. “He wants to talk to you again.”

Fe never returned to us that night.

When you are in a hostage situation, you just do what you have to do. You put the emotions of it all in the back of your mind and don’t let yourself get carried away with how you are doing or how you are feeling. Otherwise, you would go crazy.

Since I have been back in America, people have often asked me, “What were you feeling at this time or on that occasion?” To be quite honest, I can’t remember. My defense mechanisms had risen up to block the feelings. I was disciplining myself
not
to put feelings into words. My job was rather to put one foot in front of the other, to stay alive one more day. We just kept going and praying that we could get back to our children. That’s all.

* * *

By this time, everyone was miserable from the cold. Musab and Ediborah had some extra plastic with which they would make a little windbreak.

I went to see Fe every day just to make sure she was doing okay. Bless her heart, she always had some food for me—perhaps a banana, or what they call
bianbons,
which are green bananas that have been roasted, then mushed up and put into a banana leaf, then roasted again. They were really good. She was always happy to see me coming, and we enjoyed talking together.

One night she brought us a big Tupperware cup of hot soup made of sweet coconut milk with little flour balls (like dumplings) in it. The mixture also included corn, some kind of dried beans, and I think some bananas. It was really, really good—what a wonderful gift. We enjoyed it so much that night.

Before she left, we prayed with her. The next day, she came back to tell me something, although I could see that she was reluctant. Finally, she got it out.

“You know that soup I brought you last night?”

I nodded.

“Uh, that was from my wedding feast. Moghira really wanted us to get married. I didn’t want to, but . . . like he says, if I’m his wife, he has the say about what I do. He can release me, and it doesn’t have to be a committee decision.”

“Well, thank you for telling me,” I replied. “If you felt you had to do this, we’re behind you. You hang in there.”

We prayed together then as we had before, but this was the last time. We didn’t want Fe to put herself at risk with Moghira. As far as religion was concerned, Fe always told me, “I’m still a Christian. Even though I do their praying and everything, I haven’t converted to Islam in my heart.”

The same scenario unfolded with Angie. She was quickly put to work as Sabaya’s secretary, bringing us letters she had prepared for him so we could check the English. Some were about the Golden Harvest boys, wanting the local Muslim organization to send them on
hajj
(pilgrimage to Mecca) and also to college. All of the Golden Harvest boys had converted to Islam, or so they said.

Occasionally, one of the guys even tried to solicit Martin’s interest. “Are you ready to convert to Islam?” they would bluntly ask.

Whenever I heard this, I started framing a dramatic rebuttal in my mind, something along the lines of
Christ is my only Lord and Savior, and I will never deny him no matter what you do to me!

Martin was much more astute. The Abu Sayyaf already knew where his loyalty lay, and so he elected not to pick a fight. “Hmm, well, you know, my father is a Christian. His father before him was a Christian. Going even further back, my family has always been Christian. . . .”

At about this point, they would give in, saying, “Yes, I understand that you have a long heritage.” And the subject would be dropped.

Sheila never married Omar. I’m not sure he ever asked her; I think he was afraid his other wife would be upset. Musab, however, started pressuring Ediborah to be his wife. But she held out for a while.

(Months later we learned that Solaiman, who was supposed to be out finishing arrangements with Doctora Rose for our release, had instead headed to Jolo Island and picked up two more wives in addition to the one he already had. The rest of the Abu Sayyaf were pretty upset about that. “He’s off having fun while we keep suffering in the jungle,” they complained.)

Whenever Martin mentioned how much he missed his children, Musab brushed him off with a comment about the hardship of being away from his own much larger brood. “It’s harder for me,” he said. “You miss your children three. I miss my children nine.”

* * *

More battles, more running in the rain, more missed meals, more desperation. During those days, I began to notice the weight just falling off Martin, especially in his shoulders. I could see his shoulder blades sticking out. Never a big man to start with—he weighed 72 kilos (158 pounds) when we were captured—he was now turning into a scarecrow.

We stopped for the Muslim prayers one evening and then kept going. We came to the road and began walking along it in the darkness—something that always made me nervous, because it left us too exposed. But by this hour, we were all just kind of brain-dead, putting one foot in front of the other.

All of a sudden, right in front of us, shooting started. There were soldiers on the road. We ducked out of their sight. In the ensuing chaos, Joel was lucky enough to escape, which reduced the main hostage count down to six. Several of the Golden Harvest Plantation boys also got away, one of whom was carrying the medical bag. We were glad for them, of course, but also depressed that once again, we were still in captivity.

The loss of the medical bag meant that now we didn’t have medicine or scissors—a serious loss for us all. A few days later, the one remaining sat-phone quit working; Sabaya’s rather lame explanation was that “the thunder hit it.” (Thunder?) Whatever the cause, we knew we were steadily losing our connections to the outside world.

My biggest physical problem at this point was with my feet, which had begun to ooze a clear pus. I put them out in the sun whenever we stopped. I tried to think of something else to make them heal.

In my backpack I had been carrying a bit of sunscreen. I was tempted to throw it away, because we really didn’t need protection from the sun, what with all the clothing I was required to wear. Martin also had to keep his head covered. But I began reading the ingredients on the sunscreen bottle, and noticed aloe as well as vitamin E.

I told Martin, “Okay, maybe this will help my feet. It’s going to sting like the dickens, but I’m going to try it anyway.” I grimaced as I put it on, but it did seem to help.

Another thing that helped my mental outlook, if not my body, was remembering Scripture I had memorized long ago. I would have given anything to have had an actual Bible, of course. But that obviously was not going to happen.

One Sunday I found a piece of paper and began writing down all the promises of God that I could recall. My wording wasn’t verbatim in every case, but I came up with quite a few:

I will never leave thee / He careth for you / Will supply all your needs / I’ll prepare a place for you / I’ll come again / Honor parents & your days will be long / If we confess, he will cleanse & forgive / Ask & it shall be given to you / He that believeth in me, tho dead, shall live / Acknowledge Him & He’ll direct your path / If any man open the door, I will come in & sup w/ him / I’ve loved you w/ everlasting love / When He appears, we’ll be like Him / He’ll perform a good work in you / I will not leave you comfortless, I will come to you / And lo, I am with you always / He that believeth in me shall not perish but have everlasting life / Delight in the Lord and He’ll give you the desires of your heart.

What a comfort it was to review these eternal truths. In the face of the most dreadful circumstances, these were the words of the One I could depend upon.