In the Presence of My Enemies (30 page)

We carried those around for months. One day I said, “Martin, this is not going to be a quick captivity. We’re carrying all this extra weight through the jungle; what do you think?”

“Man, I hate to get rid of them. I just keep thinking we’re going to get out soon. If I could walk out of here looking decent, I’d really like it.”

A few days later, though, we gave up and buried the jeans behind some rocks. He was very sad about this, and so was I. We kept the shirt, however, for warmth at night.

Sometime in February, as the food supply kept shrinking, I began noticing that when I sat up in the morning, I could feel the blood pulsing through my head,
boom—boom—boom!
That went on for weeks, until the diet improved again. I didn’t know if my blood pressure had gone crazy or what. It was scary.

When I was really down and feeling sorry for myself, I would think about what I might have wished had never happened.

Did I wish our family had never come to the Philippines in the first place? No, we’d had a wonderful fifteen years before the capture.

Did I wish I’d never married Martin? Absolutely not.

Did I wish I’d never become a Christian when I was a little girl? No.

The only thing I could agree to wishing was that I’d never been born. I sounded like Job when he said in his agony, “May the day of my birth perish. . . . That day—may it turn to darkness; may God above not care about it; may no light shine upon it” (Job 3:3-4).

Obviously, my mental state was becoming shaky. Several times I said to Martin, “I would rather be dead than live anymore in this situation.”

“Gracia, you can survive. What do you think the kids would say if you could pick up the phone and call them?”

I had to admit, “They’d say, ‘Just keep going, Mom, because maybe you’ll get to come home someday.’ ”

“That’s right. And that’s what you need to do. Don’t let your mind think long-term. Just keep walking until the next rest break. All this will seem like such a little while after you’re out.”

Poor Martin—he was so good to put up with my emotions. If we were in a gun battle and I was falling apart, he would say, “Gracia, this isn’t the time to cry. You’re wasting energy. You need to get ahold of yourself—you can cry later, okay?”

But he never reprimanded me for crying. It made me think back to earlier days, when I was homeschooling the kids, and I pushed Jeffrey so hard to perform that he would burst into tears. On more than one occasion I had said, “I don’t want to see you cry, because you’re just trying to get your way.” I was really impatient and unfair with him.

Now in the jungle, I thought to myself,
How would you feel if someone walked up to you right now and said, “I don’t want you crying, because you’re just trying to get your own way”?
I promised myself that if I ever got back to Jeff, I would sit him down and apologize for pushing him so hard. He was actually a good student, and so were the other kids. I just expected them to be perfect little adults instead of kids who were learning to make their way in the world.

* * *

I also learned to lighten up a bit with one of the captors named Akmad. He was about fifteen years old, like our Jeff, only chunkier, and could be happy-go-lucky sometimes. But he was very moody at times—a normal teenage boy, I guess.

He found ways to divert our food to his own benefit. Sometimes he claimed that the group food was “personal.” He was the one who had invented the strange line “You can’t have any of this—we need this food, because we’re fasting.” (The Abu Sayyaf generally “fasted” on Mondays and Thursdays—during daylight hours, that is. They ate before sunrise and after sunset, of course.)

One day Akmad and a couple of others were chosen to supervise our bathing and laundry process at the river. We knew this wasn’t a favorite job for them, so we tried to hurry up and do exactly as we were told. “Faster, faster!” Akmad barked. Soon he began throwing rocks at me to get me to hustle even more.

Upset, I swung around and said, “Okay, then I
won’t
hurry! Go ahead and throw them at me!” He didn’t understand all of my English, but the rocks kept coming.

Still not getting the results he wanted, he cocked his gun.

“Fine—go ahead and shoot me,” I said. “I really don’t care.”

Fortunately, he didn’t take me seriously, but the rock barrage continued until Martin finally said, “No! Don’t do that!” Only then did he stop.

A few days later, Akmad happened to see a picture of our daughter, Mindy, who was only twelve. Of course, Filipina girls are small, and so Mindy appeared quite mature in Akmad’s eyes. He began saying he’d like to marry her.

“No way,” I replied, “after the way you’ve been treating me!”

Ediborah translated what I said to Akmad. He just grinned and said back to her, “How do I tell her in English that I’m a ‘good boy’?” She taught him the English phrase.

But whenever he tried to use it with me after that, he got confused. I’d go to the fire, and Akmad would say brightly, “You are a ‘good boy’?”

I’d smile and say, “Yes, Akmad, you are a ‘good boy.’”

He would then push his luck by saying another English term he’d learned from Ediborah: “Mother-in-law?” At this, everybody would laugh.

I would shrug my shoulders and say, “Maybe—if you are a ‘good boy’! ”

Several times when I saw him stealing dried fish, I’d scold him, “Akmad! You are a ‘bad boy’!”

He would just smile at me and insist, “I am a ‘good boy’!”

I remember thinking more than once,
This kid should be coming home from school to warm cookies and milk, not traipsing through the jungle with an M16.
Instead, he and the other young ones were more like the “lost boys” in
Peter Pan.
Martin and I even used that term for them once in a while when talking in the late evenings.

In a gun battle later on, Akmad ended up taking a bullet through his thigh. He could not just lie down, however; he had to run with the rest of us for quite a distance. We went through a swamp with water up to our waists, which of course infected the wound.

At the first chance to rest, I noticed some of the guys picking up leaves from the ground and putting them into their mouths to chew. I didn’t know what this was all about until they then began stuffing the masticated leaves into Akmad’s wound as some sort of medication. Martin and I gazed at this in disbelief and decided to keep quiet. Then the wound was bandaged to stop the bleeding.

Martin gave up his long
malong
for use as a stretcher. Akmad was then carried along the trail with the rest of us.

Before long, however, infection had produced a high fever. He began talking out of his head. Late one night, we heard him repeating himself over and over in his language. The only parts we could understand were the intervals of
“Allah akbar! Allah akbar! Allah akbar!”
Then he began to growl in a low voice, “Personal! . . . Personal! . . . Personal!” I felt so sorry for this young man.

The days wore on, and there were too many soldiers in the area to risk sending Akmad out for medical help. His ranting became more frequent as his condition worsened. Naturally, he needed help going to the bathroom, and others were not always nearby to assist him.

One day, he had soiled his
malong
and sleeping mat, and I could see that he was upset.

“Hugasi bani?”
I said in my fractured Cebuano, which means “May I wash this for you?”

February 11

On Jeff’s fifteenth birthday relatives gather for another party.

Mid-February

The Bush administration adopts a “subtle, but very important” shift in U.S. policy on civilian hostage situations, from “no deals at all” to case-by-case consideration, with an openness to ransom if it would in some way bring terrorists to justice.

February 21

A U.S. Chinook helicopter goes down in the sea off Zamboanga; ten soldiers die. The Abu Sayyaf hear this news and rejoice.

He nodded.

I took the two items to the stream and washed them out. As I hung them up to dry, the thought came to me:
If this were Jeff, I’d want some lady to show kindness to him.

* * *

Jeff’s birthday (February 11) came and went, as did Valentine’s Day. We tried to make cards for each other. In my log I wrote: “If we ever get out of here, Martin wants Valentine cookies (sugar) w/ frosting and cupcakes w/ frosting. . . . How I wish I could make him some. I love him so much—and we are hungry.”

For the time being, however, we made do with the local snacks if they were available. The three “official goodies” of the Abu Sayyaf were:

• Magic Flakes, which are three saltine crackers with icing between

• Cloud 9, a candy bar sort of like a Milky Way, but with no shortening (or at least none listed in the ingredients)

• Bingo cookies, similar to Oreo cookies

Martin even kept the empty wrappers so he could smell them when there was nothing else to eat. The leftover aroma dampened his hunger pangs a little.

Meanwhile, we were learning to appreciate a different kind of delicacy: eel. The river had lots of eels, and the guys built beautiful fish traps with vines and other materials to catch them. Eel is really good to eat; it has a lot of fatty skin, and the meat is excellent. We thanked the Lord every time somebody brought us a slice of eel for supper.

We learned to avoid dried squid, however, which is something Filipinos seem to love. Martin quickly found out it made him very sick. One night they forgot to handcuff him for sleeping—which turned out to be convenient when he needed to go vomit in the woods. He was careful to call out,
“Sakit ako! Sakit ako!
[I’m sick! I’m sick!]” so they wouldn’t think he was trying to escape and shoot him.

That was the last time we ate squid; from then on we skipped those particular meals.

The first few times I faced little dried fish, complete with heads and tails, I took off the head, then carefully picked the rest apart, throwing away each tiny bone in order to get at the meat. I then sprinkled the meat on our rice to give it flavor.

But as time went on and we began to starve, we decided the fish heads probably had good protein. Everyone else was eating them, and we started to as well, along with the bones of the skeleton—we just chomped down everything.

Sometimes bigger fish would come, and we would be given only the head. We learned to chew it up and be grateful for the nutrition. Fish-head bones are not as hard as one might think; the only part that can’t really be crunched, believe it or not, is the eyeball. It’s hard as a rock. Martin just swallowed his whole and let his stomach do the work. I couldn’t make mine go down, so I’d throw it away.

One day about the time I did laundry for Akmad, I was at the babbling brook again. I looked down at a tiny pool formed by the rocks at the edge and saw a little fish about an inch and a half long.

Early March

Gracia’s uncle approaches an American philanthropist for ransom money and gets a favorable response.

March 11

The Wall Street Journal
runs a front-page article on the widening war against terrorism and reports, “The most ambitious U.S. military action outside Afghanistan is taking place on the small island of Basilan.” The article attributes to U.S. officials the opinion that “the Philippine troops are poorly organized and have yet to learn how to move with the stealth and speed they need to rescue the Burnhams and Ms. [Ediborah] Yap.”

I didn’t think I could catch it, but I reached down anyway—and grabbed it by the tail. I held it up to Martin. “Look! I caught this fish!” I exclaimed, very proud of myself. “Do you want it?”

“No, that’s okay.”

So I popped it in my mouth and ate it raw. After all, if I carried it around with me until a cooking fire became available, it might rot. Better to get the nutrition now. In fact, it tasted very good. Who says God had to supply our needs the same way every time?

By now my hair was getting long and needed to be in a ponytail to stay out of my eyes. My
terong
wasn’t enough to do the job. Obviously, I didn’t have a scrunchie or a rubber band to use. What to do?

Lord, can you figure out something for me to use to tie back my hair?
I began to pray. That may sound silly to others, but when we had absolutely nothing, we learned to pray about things as mundane as this.

I was learning the truth of the Scripture that says, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father” (James 1:17). If somebody walked by and handed us a tiny boiled banana only two inches long, our immediate response was
Oh, thank you, God! We need this.
Every bite was a gift.

Soon after, I glanced down at the ground—and there lay a strip of black rubber, like from a bicycle inner tube. I picked it up, tied the ends together in a knot, and gleefully pulled my hair back. This became my scrunchie for a long, long time.

When I lay down in the hammock on my back, however, I’d have to take it out to be comfortable. I was always afraid of losing it. So I would carefully stuff it into my pocket. I needed to guard this prized possession.

* * *

Sabaya had an unusual question one day: “Are there a million Christians in America?”

“Oh, certainly,” Martin replied.

“Well, then, couldn’t they give a dollar each and get you guys out of here?”

We just groaned. I said to Sabaya, “There are a lot of Americans in the States who wouldn’t give you a single dollar, Sabaya. You are a bad guy, and people don’t give their money to bad guys!”

He looked at me, shocked, as if to say,
What? Me? A bad guy?
This was preposterous, to his way of thinking.