In the Presence of My Enemies (17 page)

“Well, at least they’re not like the armed forces, who are just out here for the pay,” she tried to reason.

“A country has to have armed forces, or else it won’t survive,” I countered. “These bandits would be totally out of control otherwise.”

I don’t know that I totally convinced her. The Abu Sayyaf had fed her a lot of propaganda. Fortunately, her ransom came through along with Chito’s not much later, and the two of them were allowed to leave. Before they left, we urged Chito to call our children. I especially hated to see Lalaine leave; I had really grown to love her.

I was tempted to send out my wedding ring, which was still safely hidden in my pocket after all these weeks. But I held back, thinking that we’d probably be released ourselves before too long. After all, others were getting to go; we would surely get our opening soon, wouldn’t we?

Chito’s last words to Martin and me were, “Give me two weeks—a month at the most—and I’ll have you out of here.” That was July 3, 2001.

* * *

The motorbike that picked up Lalaine and Chito that night must have brought food, because after we walked for about an hour, we stopped in a deserted village to make a meal. The guys built a fire and we ate, even though it was two o’clock in the morning. By this time, we had learned to eat whenever food was available, regardless of what the clock said.

Actually, our food supply had been pretty good lately. We’d been eating about two meals each day, and even when we ran short, we could always resort to
pacō
, a dark green fern that grows in the jungle. We could snip off the curly tops and eat them raw. Since they’re bright green, I assume they’re quite healthy.

Sometimes the captors boiled the
pacō
. Other times they stir-fried it with a bit of onion. It was really very good.

Although they were still on a mission, the Abu Sayyaf didn’t seem to be in an aggressive mode these days. They weren’t pressing the battle against the AFP but were instead trying to avoid them, since they had to take care of us while waiting for their financial windfall.

This passivity was actually harder for these warriors than the gun battles were. They sometimes referred to their daily lot as “babysitting.” Had it not been for us, they could have gone after the AFP with a vengeance.

At times, from up on a hill, we would spot an AFP camp. One of the guys would say to another, “Boy, if we didn’t have these people, we’d go down there and raid them good!”

But the money was always thought to be “right around the corner,” so we waited.

Somehow, the three of us—Joel, Martin, and I—ended up with a group of a dozen or so captors led by Mang Ben. We learned that as long as we were in Mang Ben’s group, the goat meat would be extra spicy.

For some reason, he liked the idea of Hurayra learning English. He told the others in his group, “You need to do the same. You won’t go far in this world without it.”

Mang Ben organized his men into two-hour guard shifts throughout the night, to make sure we didn’t escape. One night when I was sitting up to work the kinks out of my joints, Mang Ben’s stern voice came booming out of the darkness:

“Why you do that?!”

I couldn’t see his face at all. “Do what?” I asked in return.

“You lay down!” he ordered from his hammock.

“I’m sore; I hurt, because I’m lying on the ground.” I continued to sit there for a while, despite his command. Eventually, however, I did lie down again to try to rest.

Honestly, the Abu Sayyaf really didn’t need to worry about our trying to escape. Martin and I talked about the possibility all the time, but every time, we came to the same conclusion: If we tried to escape and were caught, we would be shot, end of story.

I know that if I hadn’t been there, Martin would have escaped. In fact, he often told me that if ever I had the chance to get away, I should take it. “If I know you’re out, I’ll get away, too. Don’t worry about me,” he said. But he knew it would be impossible for us to escape together. Whenever we talked about it, he’d ask me, “How far can you run? If we leave together, they’ll be after us in no time. These guys can run all day. Can you do that?” I’d have to admit that no, I couldn’t.

“Gracia, my gut feeling is this: We’re going to get out of here sooner or later,” he’d say. “Believe me, I don’t plan to make a career of this hostage thing.”

And so we waited for our ransom money to arrive.

* * *

People in America often ask me if the Abu Sayyaf were cruel to me personally. Well, yes, of course—the whole kidnapping was cruel. But one incident stands out in my memory. I was suffering from diarrhea (a common condition for me). When Haija, an especially harsh captor, came one evening to chain Martin and me together, I knew I’d need to be up during the night. “I’m sick,” I explained. “Would you please not chain me tonight?”

Without a word, he began securing us to each other and then to the tree.

“I’m going to have to go to the CR during the night,” I said. “Please? I promise I’ll be here in the morning. You know I won’t leave Martin.”

His handsome face remained a stone. He snapped the lock shut and handed the key to Sakaki, giving instructions in a language I didn’t understand.

Guess I’ll just have to bother Sakaki then,
I thought to myself.

Not long into the night, I knew I needed to get up. “Sakaki! Sakaki!” I called. But I couldn’t wake him.

Joel was sleeping nearby, and he heard my calls.

“Joel! Please go get the key from Sakaki!”

He sat up but didn’t move farther. Instead, he started to rearrange and smooth the empty rice sacks on which we were sleeping.

“Joel—I have LBM [loose bowel movement]. I have to go into the woods!”

He still didn’t answer but kept looking down at the rice sacks.

“What’s wrong, Joel?”

Finally he spoke. “Haija said we’re not allowed to let you free,” he quietly admitted.

I started to panic. “Joel, what am I going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

Martin was still asleep. I looked around in growing desperation. I realized I had a plastic bag, left over from a bunch of bananas. So I gingerly slid over to one side, away from the others, squatted down, and used the bag as best I could there in the darkness. I felt utterly degraded. Any source of water for cleaning up was, of course, beyond my reach.

To me, that qualified as cruelty.

Early the next morning, as the sun was just coming up and before we were unchained, Joel was thoughtful enough to remove the bag into the woods. That day, we raised a healthy complaint about all this to Solaiman. We told him how awful it had been. He didn’t apologize, but after that our treatment seemed to improve a bit.

Every so often, we’d make a wish list of things we needed. For example, on one such list, I put deodorant, two apples, two oranges, and peanut butter. We got the deodorant and peanut butter (a new food experience for the Abu Sayyaf). We also ended up with two big packages of Apple Dapple cookies (seventy-two in all) and two packages of orange crème cookies (again, a total of seventy-two)!

This was great for Martin and me, because Muslims refuse to eat anything that contains MSG or shortening. That meant we got the cookies all to ourselves.

My mosquito bites had gotten infected, and I didn’t have enough self-control not to scratch them. One day I said to Martin, “If I could wish for anything right now, it would be a bottle of rubbing alcohol.”

Not more than thirty minutes later, one of the guys walked by and tossed us a bottle of Green Cross rubbing alcohol. “From Solaiman,” he said, and kept walking. Of all the random things!

One of the captors was the cutest seventeen-year-old named Ibno Sahid. He often perched his hammock directly over us. Whenever we said something to him, he got the biggest smile on his face.

Then I realized that he didn’t speak a lick of English. He just knew when to smile and nod.

Eventually, he came to me, with Joel as his interpreter. “I want to learn to read,” he said, explaining that he didn’t know how to read any language at all.

“Well, you get a notebook like Hurayra’s,” I replied. “Get a pen, too, and I’ll start teaching you English.”

He found a little spiral notebook, and for our first lesson, I wrote his name on the opening page. I showed him an empty peanut butter jar and then wrote down the words “peanut butter.” I also began teaching him what the different letters sounded like.

I figured it wouldn’t hurt to be helpful to a young guy like this. And it gave me something to do with my mind other than worry about things outside my control.

* * *

One day, some planes flew over in a pattern. “What are those?” the Abu Sayyaf asked Martin, knowing that he was informed about such things.

“Those planes are searching for us,” Martin replied. We all grew a bit more nervous. Soon the order came to pack up again for moving out. But then we sat and waited for firm instructions while the leaders huddled together. They delayed so long that a couple of the guys put their hammocks back up again. I sat talking with Reina, and we began to relax.

All of a sudden, across an open field, we saw soldiers heading straight for us. The guns blazed, and we all dropped to the ground.

“Reina! Come with us!” I said.

“No, no—I have to go back to the emir,” she answered, using the Arabic term for “leader.” She headed one direction back toward Janjalani, while we headed the other way. We ran, then dropped, then ran, then dropped again.

As soon as we were able to regroup, we saw that Ibno had been wounded quite badly, along with two other captors. Reina had gotten some shrapnel in her face. The battle quieted down, and we walked about fifteen minutes down toward a river. Suddenly, gunfire opened up right ahead of us. We dropped and ran once again.

Joel landed right beside me at one point, and in his terror, I think he was praying every prayer he’d ever heard. First it was “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners both now and at the hour of our death.” Soon, however, he switched to
“Allah akbar! Allah akbar! Allah akbar!”

“Pray, Gracia, pray!” he urged.

“I’m praying, Joel, I’m praying!” I guess he thought because he didn’t hear me verbally, I must not be doing my part.

A helicopter appeared overhead, searching for us. We huddled under trees in order to stay out of sight. In the midst of this danger, however, I looked up—and there was Bro using one of the stolen video cameras from Dos Palmas, filming the whole scene!
This man is absolutely fearless,
I thought.

The helicopter eventually flew away, and we tried to hike again—until we ran into yet another group of AFP soldiers. We realized we were trapped in the field. We had no choice but to sit down in the hot sun and wait.

There was a stream of water in that field, but it was full of leech eggs. We had to drink something in order to stay hydrated in the hot sun, so we closed our eyes and gulped it down.

Then out of nowhere, a bag of ripe
lansones
started going down the line of captors and hostages. Where they came from I have no idea. I absolutely love
lansones
—they’re a fruit a little smaller than an apricot and sort of like a grape inside.

“Gracia, it’s your favorite fruit!” Martin said.

“Yes, it is!”

“Can you believe it? Right here in the middle of this battle, the Lord managed to get you some
lansones
!” Martin said with a chuckle.

Around four that afternoon, I was off in the weeds when Sakaki began yelling, “Ma’am! ma’am! Come, come, come!” I got back to him just as the gunfire broke out again. This battle simply would not quit.

We crawled on our elbows until we got into a group again. While we were lying there, someone arrived with stunning news.

Mang Ben had been killed.

I stared off into space, thinking of his wife and three children back home—a boy, a girl, and then another boy—just like our family. I began to cry quietly. This man, our group’s leader, was already at that moment plunging into an eternity he wasn’t ready for.

I thought about the reason Martin and I had come to the Philippines in the first place: to help people like Mang Ben find forgiveness through Christ and get ready for the hereafter. The tears now came harder than ever.

The only way I was able to regain my composure was to remember that this is what Mang Ben had always said he wanted: to die in jihad. He had gotten his wish after all.

Suddenly, Hurayra bolted down toward the stream with bullets still whizzing by. As he ran, he screamed at the top of his lungs, “Fifty-seven! Fifty-seven!”

The AFP thought that an M57—a bazooka that could do a lot of damage—was being loaded up to fire at them, and they scattered in retreat. This gave the Abu Sayyaf time to drag Mang Ben’s body back to the group.

I stayed in the grass, lying facedown. It was so unbelievably hot, I began to hyperventilate. I looked over at the wounded Ibno, who was breathing heavily. It didn’t seem as though his injuries were serious enough to be fatal, but I still felt so badly for him. My mind began to cloud over, the same sensation I’d felt back in the hospital corridor in Lamitan when we were being bombed. My brain seemed to be shutting down. I fought to get my breath.

“I’m just going to sleep,” I murmured to Martin, who was lying close to me.

“Okay,” he answered.

I laid my head down and actually drifted off for a few minutes.

My repose was broken, however, by a swirl of animated talk about what to do with Mang Ben’s body. If the AFP got their hands on it, they could turn it in for a reward of several thousand pesos. The Abu Sayyaf were determined not to let them have that satisfaction.

By then it was dark, and they carried the body to the far end of the field. Someone used the sat-phone to call Mang Ben’s village and tell them to come get their fallen brother.

That night, Mang Ben’s gear was brought into camp for dispersing. I ended up with a backpack—not Mang Ben’s, because it was too nice. But the person who got that backpack gave his old one to someone else, and so on down the line, until eventually I ended up with a shabby one. At least it was a place for my things. I happily began loading up my sheet, deodorant, some sanitary napkins I’d been able to acquire, and the precious Burnham toothbrush.