In the Presence of My Enemies (28 page)

In America, the postholiday question when everyone returns to work or school or church is, “Did you have a good Christmas?”

Yes, Martin and I had a good Christmas. Why? (1) We had something to eat, and (2) we didn’t have to pack up and hike. In our minds, that made the day positive.

* * *

On December 30 or so, word came that we were to mobile to a certain place to meet Sabaya and the others who had gone with him.

Every relocation, of course, meant finding a new spot for our hammock. Martin used to drive me crazy redoing it. He would get it all set up between two trees and then say, “Okay, why don’t you sit down and test this?”

December 26 and following

Christmas presents for Martin and Gracia remain unopened in a corner of the Burnham living room in Kansas.

December 28

The Joneses and Burnhams gather at the Kansas City home of Gracia’s brother, Paul. The families have an extended prayer time for Martin and Gracia.

December 29–31

Rep. Todd Tiahrt travels to the Philippines to meet with President Arroyo and military leaders.

I’d sit down. “Fine—it feels really good.”

“Well, it looks to me like this end is a little higher than the other end. Why don’t you get up, and I’ll retie it.”

After this process was completed, I would again pronounce it perfect—and he’d say, “Well, I may have gotten that just a bit low. Could you stand up again? I’ll retie it.”

This would go on and on until I’d say, “Enough already! The hammock is fine. You’re just like my brother-in-law Bill!”

A few years before, I had gone with Bill one day to shop for apples. At the first grocery store, we walked through the fruit section, and he must have picked up every apple to examine it, but ended up buying only four or five. Then we went to a few orchards, where he used the same scrutiny. He felt the apples and hemmed and hawed. Sometimes he bought a few, and sometimes none at all. It was hilarious.

Now in the jungle, I joked with Martin, “I hope you never go apple shopping with Bill. You two would take weeks and probably buy nothing!”

Every time after that, whenever I got annoyed with his perfectionism, I said, “Someday you and Bill are going to go shopping for apples!” And we’d laugh together.

When we joined up with Sabaya, we learned that he had not been able to go to town as intended; too many soldiers were watching. But a negotiation was still proceeding, he claimed, and things were going to turn out fine regardless.

He told with some pleasure how the AFP had tried to poison him but failed. He had hired a man to get food for the group, and one day he had put in a request for fresh fish.

The man, however, had leaked this information to the military. The AFP had offered to provide the fish. The toxin they added had made the Abu Sayyaf members very sick. One of them named Bashir had almost died, in fact. But in the end, they were all alive to tell the story.

The next day we said good-bye to Moghira and another leader, Umbran, who took their groups off on a striking force. This left just fourteen of us: Ediborah, Martin, myself, and eleven captors.

While gathering up some marang under a tree, we noticed an unusual airplane overhead. It wasn’t the kind that usually tracked across the Basilan sky. All eyes turned to Martin.

“Is that the kind that’s going to bomb us?” people wanted to know.

“Oh, no. That’s a twin-engine plane, the kind flown by a dignitary or someone very important.”

Sabaya looked at us and said, “Well, on the radio I heard that your congressman is here from the United States, from Kansas.”

We looked up again, longingly this time. Could it be that Representative Todd Tiahrt, our congressman from the Wichita area, was actually so near at hand? A warm feeling came over us. Maybe he would be able to bring about a breakthrough where so many others had failed.

That night Ediborah came up with special treats to welcome the new year: tiny pieces of cheese and some crackers. The next day, a newspaper arrived in the camp. A new letter had arrived from “them”—again, we didn’t know who—requesting another “proof of life.” Sabaya somehow came up with a camera, and so we posed sitting together and holding up the newspaper with its date.

Martin had to show Sabaya how to load the film and where the shutter button was. With every attempt at pressing it, however, Sabaya jerked the camera wildly. We told him he needed to hold still, but we weren’t very successful.

Ediborah posed with us for a couple of pictures, too.

* * *

The coming of the year 2002 meant that we no longer had a calendar. We’d been referring to the small 2001 pocket calendar I had rescued from our identification on the speedboat, but now we would have to keep track of the date in our heads. More than once there was disagreement in the camp about what day it really was. But Martin, with his organized mind, invariably turned out to be correct.

Soon the military pressure increased again, and we retreated inland to the higher elevations. One evening, as the sun was setting, we were going through our nightly routine before bedtime—I would put on an extra shirt and extra pair of pants; we’d brush our teeth; we’d pray together; Martin would carefully stow his glasses in their case for safekeeping—when suddenly, we heard wood being chopped not far away.

“Sundalo!”
came the word. “Just on the other side of the hill!” They were chopping down trees and setting up their hammocks.

We very quietly packed up and took off in the opposite direction, down to a river and then along a trail.

There, in a quiet moment, we heard a soldier talking into his radio! Obviously, there were more soldiers in that direction, too. We just kept walking. Late that night, we stopped along a river for a few hours of sleep. Early the next morning, we moved on into the mountains, where we spent a relatively peaceful four or five weeks.

Martin and I gave this place a name—“Camp Contentment”—because that is what the Lord was teaching us there.

“You know,” Martin said to me one day, “here in the mountains I’ve seen hatred; I’ve seen bitterness; I’ve seen greed; I’ve seen covetousness; I’ve seen wrongdoing.” I nodded my head vigorously, thinking back to incidents I had observed as well.

But then he surprised me. He hadn’t been talking about the Abu Sayyaf as I had assumed.

“I’ve seen each of these things in myself. The Lord has been showing me how incredibly sinful I am.” He then proceeded to go back through the list.

“Hatred? At times I have hated these guys so strongly. When we were getting cheated out of food, I’d sit and think,
Wow, I wish I had a big pot of rice, and
they
were the ones chained to a tree. I’d sit there and eat it all in front of them.

January 2, 2002

The Philippine government accepts U.S. offer of “training and logistical support.”

January 3

Martin’s sister and brother-in-law, Walt and Cheryl Spicer, return to their teaching at Faith Academy in Manila.

“At other times, when one of them pulled out a ‘personal’ snack from their stash and ate it, I coveted it rather than being happy for that person.”

He kept going through the list. We talked about how our hearts are wicked, and how we had rationalized that by saying we were the ones being wronged and so our feelings were only “natural.”

“But Jesus said to love your enemies . . . do good to those who hate you . . . pray for those who despitefully use you,” Martin continued. “He said we were to be the servants of all—and he didn’t add any exception clause like, ‘except for terrorists, whom you have every right to hate.’

“Let’s just ask the Lord to work out some contentment in our hearts and teach us what he wants us to learn.”

We decided to do that. We committed our situation to the Lord. I can’t say we became models of saintliness after this. But we did get to the point where we could go stand at the fire and accept a lesser amount of food than everyone else without complaining or going back to our spot discussing our portion size. That had become a bad habit of ours, and we were able to stop it.

I saw Martin’s servant heart with regard to one of the fellows we called “57,” since it was his job to carry the M57 mortar. He seemed perpetually in a bad mood. I had said to Martin that I thought the name was fitting for him since he’d been a grouch for at least fifty-seven days in a row!

Only later did we find out that he suffered from chronic headaches.

Martin went over to him one day when he was sitting, just moaning from the pain. We had gotten some ibuprofen in a recent package, and Martin gave him one. “Here, this will help your head,” he said. “I’m praying for you.”

Not long after that, “57” was sent out on a mission of some kind. When he returned, he was totally different toward us. Even when he was cranky with others, he was always nice to us. Martin continued supplying him with pain reliever whenever he sensed the need.

* * *

This resolve to be content, however, was put to ever increasing tests. In mid-January when the radio reported that American military had arrived in the Philippines to help train the AFP, it really made Musab angry. He took it out on Martin by “forgetting” to send someone in the mornings to unchain him from the tree.

If Martin, however, asked to be freed in order to go to the bathroom in the woods, they freed him and did not rechain him afterwards. He found himself debating whether to say he had to go even if he didn’t, just for the benefit of getting loose.

It got to the point where if Martin didn’t say anything, he was chained twenty-four hours a day.

Meanwhile, I was really craving privacy, especially while going to the bathroom. Finally I dragged all the branches that people had chopped down while arranging their hammocks and formed a barrier up against a hill so Ediborah and I could avoid being watched. The only trouble was that the brush pile proved attractive to snakes. One day she showed me a snakeskin she had found.

January 16

Brian and Arlita Burnham return to their mission work in Papua New Guinea.

January 17

Jeff calls Radyo Agong to wish his mother a happy birthday.

I said with a touch of fatalism, “Well, good! If one of them bites me, that’ll be the end of me, and I’ll be outta here.” At this point, death seemed a pretty good alternative to living the rest of my days as a hostage.

By then, both of us were getting so little to eat that our monthly periods ceased. In the earlier months there had been enough money to keep the women supplied with what they needed, and when anybody was ransomed out, she passed her supplies down to the ones remaining. Now the Abu Sayyaf were low on money—but it didn’t matter anymore.

Ediborah was worried, however, that perhaps she had become pregnant, which Musab very much wanted. I told her, “Don’t worry about it—my period has stopped, too. It’s the lack of nutrition.” In fact, I was right. Several months later, when the diet improved, our cycles resumed. Only then did we have to resort to using rags a few times.

As for toilet paper: I enjoyed a grand total of two rolls during the entire twelve months of captivity. I made them last as long as possible!

* * *

Staring at the same tree day after day after day, Martin started planning businesses he might launch if we ever got back to Kansas or Arkansas.

“What if I set up a flight school? Or what if I lined up weekend seminars for pilot certification?” He began estimating the income this might bring and the costs it would entail.

Several times Martin mentioned that when he got back to the States, he’d like to try to find the Taylorcraft single-engine plane that my dad had owned long ago. He wanted to buy it back if he could.

What about starting up a doughnut shop? We picked out a certain spot for it in the parking lot near the IGA and the Pizza Hut in Rose Hill.

One day we even talked about him running for mayor of Rose Hill! We outlined a campaign, complete with candidate qualities and local issues to be tackled. How about a town swimming pool? What would stimulate more business? It was stupid, given the fact that we’d never actually lived in Rose Hill but only stayed there during furloughs every five years or so.

On another day, Martin said, “Gracia, what would you think of me becoming a pastor?” That led to a long conversation. Soon he was telling me sermon ideas.

Sometimes we made vacation plans for our family. “Let’s plan a camping trip out to the state park. We’ll leave on Friday after the kids get out of school. Should we stay through the whole weekend, or should we come back in time for Sunday morning church?” We’d plan all the gear to take, what we would eat each meal—anything to occupy our minds.

Then on January 17, a Thursday, my birthday came. I had never expected to spend this day in the jungle. The Abu Sayyaf were aware of the occasion, and two days before, they had brought in a cake about ten inches across, baked in a special pan. We guessed that the ingredients were probably about the same as those in pancake batter, except the cook had used Royal Orange soda for some of the liquid.

On my birthday, the group stretched one tiny 170-gram can of corned beef (about six ounces), imported from Brazil, over two meals. We couldn’t believe how flavorful it was. It went well with rice and Maggi noodles. When it was time to cut the cake, we got our share—two little squares about two bites each.

We managed to rig up a windbreak of branches to ward off the cold. That night we invited Ediborah over so we could visit and talk about birthday traditions. We’d saved a mini-size Cloud 9 candy bar, which we cut up with my spoon into three pieces to share with her.