In the Presence of My Enemies (9 page)

Soon we packed up and headed for Malaybalay [“m’
lye
-b’
lye”
], a small city in the mountains with several colleges. Martin found a home for his airplane almost sooner than he found a home for us; the municipal airport leased him space to build a hangar there, and construction started right away. Meanwhile, we stayed at the mission’s guesthouse while we house hunted. There was no mission compound here, which was fine with us; we looked forward to living in a regular neighborhood and making local friends.

One day a friend of ours saw an empty house while jogging and took Martin over to see it. He came back to me all excited. “You know, that house has real possibilities!” he said with his typical enthusiasm. “And the rent is only thirty dollars a month.”

“Okay! Let’s go for it!” I said without hesitation. I probably should have waited to see it first. What I found once I arrived was a place that was basically falling apart. The roof had gaping holes. And the kitchen—oh, my. Filipinos normally have what they call a “dirty kitchen” at the back of the house where they cook over an open fire. Well, in this house, the previous renters had used the house itself as their dirty kitchen, leaving the ceiling covered with soot.

“Martin! When will we ever have time to fix up this house?” I cried.

And Martin, true to form, said, “You know, I think we can do this. Don’t worry.”

All our coworkers said we should look elsewhere. But anything else we found was too expensive for our budget. So we began to fix up that house in our spare time. We didn’t have many belongings anyway, so it’s not like we had much furniture to show off. We just bought some beds and a baby bed for Jeff and moved in.

And you know, that house turned out really nice. In the back was a field where a tenant was growing peanuts, corn, and cassava. The landlord had promised us this space as soon as the current crops were harvested. So in time, we had a decent backyard. We tallied all the fruit trees one day: coconut, marang, papaya, guava, calamansi (musk lime), banana, and even some coffee trees.

Malaybalay became our home for the next eight years, and we loved everything about it. We got to know our neighbors, and even though I didn’t speak much Cebuano, I went outside every afternoon when everyone sat around talking. I loved to listen to the women chat, and eventually I made some very good friendships, even though my vocabulary was limited.

On Sundays we went to Bethel Baptist Church, which had been established way back in World War II. We grew to love the people there so much. The church had an English service in addition to one in Cebuano, which was very nice for us. There were several generations of believers in Malaybalay, and we really felt a connection with these folks. They were such a fun group of people and they seemed to really like having Martin and me at their parties. This is probably because we were always willing to do something silly—like sing along with the karaoke machine or perform a goofy skit.

In late 1989, our daughter, Melinda Joy, came along. I gave birth at the nice little Baptist hospital in town, very early in the morning on October 17. A surgeon was visiting that day—they didn’t have a resident staff surgeon—and the room was needed for procedures. Since I was feeling so good after the delivery, I got out of their way and went home before noon. I wanted to go and Oreta had come from Luzon to be with me, so I knew I’d receive good care.

Just for fun, I did the radio “sked” (schedule) that afternoon as if nothing had happened. I sat down at the radio, pressed the microphone button, and gave my usual opening spiel: “Good afternoon, this is 4FE202 signing on for traffic. . . .”

Diane Thomas, one of my missionary friends who knew I had just given birth, broke through on the other end. “Gracia Burnham, what are you doing on the radio?!” We had a good laugh. I hadn’t missed a beat.

Mindy was a wonderful, healthy baby, but when she was only a few months old, I started not to feel well. I didn’t say anything for a while, but my stomach was always upset. Finally one day I admitted to Martin, “I just don’t feel good.”

We thought it was probably a case of intestinal worms, a common malady in the Philippines. I took the standard worm treatment, three days’ worth of Combantrin. It didn’t help.

After a while, Martin said to me, “You know, Gracia, you’re acting just like you did when you were pregnant with the other kids.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I shot back. “I have a seven-month-old, and I’m still nursing!”

Eventually I went to the doctor for help. And would you believe it? I was pregnant again! Oh, my.

I headed out to the airport hangar to tell Martin. “It’s not fair to Mindy!” I cried to him. “And it’s not going to be fair to the new baby.” Obviously, there wasn’t anything to be done about it now, but I just had to vent. Later I consoled myself with the notion that I’d probably have another sweet little girl to play with Mindy. They could grow up together being best friends.

Well, delivery day arrived that December, a couple of weeks before Christmas—and here came Zachary, a boy with enough rambunctious energy for two babies! We took him home and loved him just as much as the first two. And even though he was unexpected, I have to say he’s added a wonderful dimension to our family. The year in the jungle that I was forced to spend without him, I thought of him so often and realized just how much I would be missing if he hadn’t come along to join our family.

* * *

In 1991, we finally headed home for a furlough. We had left the United States with no children. A little more than five years later, we got off the plane with three kids aged four and under. Someone gave us an old station wagon to use while we were home, and we drove all over the country visiting our list of about ten supporting churches and twenty individuals. We thanked them not only for sending checks but also for praying for us.

Our time in the States was short. In less than a year, we were back in Malaybalay, serving the eight New Tribes missionary families scattered across the island. We loved our life there. It was a wonderful time; new churches were being planted among the tribal people, and Bible translations were moving ahead at full tilt. Since these new churches were hidden up in the mountains where there were no roads, Martin stayed very busy.

I was at the radio all day, it seemed. Martin arrived at the hangar by six in the morning to load up for a flight; he preferred to fly then, when the sky tended to be clearer, before the afternoon thunderstorms built up. Meanwhile, I fed him weather information and handled anything else he needed. The flights were usually thirty to forty minutes each, plus all the miscellaneous ground time, and on some days he managed to make two round-trips instead of just one.

Things got even busier for us when the two other New Tribes pilots left the Philippine field at the same time. The Nordicks had been working on the island of Palawan but had recently lost a thirteen-month-old daughter to a mysterious, fast-moving illness. By the time they realized how seriously sick she was, she was gone. Then Sheri Nordick was diagnosed with diabetes, and right on the heels of that, their son Jake began crying day after day that his leg hurt. The Filipino doctor admitted that he didn’t know what was wrong with him. “This little boy may have cancer or something,” he told them. That did it—they headed almost straight for the airport to catch the next plane out for a furlough.

The other pilot and his wife had sons graduating from high school and felt they needed to be back in America with their boys. So they left as well. Suddenly Martin and I were trying to service three programs simultaneously. For a while, he went to one island and stayed two weeks, then to another island and stayed two weeks, then came back to Mindanao—this meant he was away from home for nearly a month at a time. We quickly saw that this wasn’t going to work.

We asked another mission organization, Wycliffe Bible Translators, to take over for us on Luzon, while we tried to juggle the remaining two islands. Once a month Martin made the long overwater flight to Palawan and stayed there ten days or more. Mostly he went alone, but sometimes I went along and brought the kids. The trips were tiring either way.

Palawan [“pa-
laow
-an”] is the 275-mile-long, thin island that, on a map, appears to poke out from the rest of the Philippines like a javelin thrown toward the southwest. It’s a naturalist’s wonderland—a concoction of mahogany forests, stunning beaches, coral reefs, and all kinds of animals, from hornbill birds to six-foot-long monitor lizards. Near Puerto Princesa, the provincial capital, is a subterranean river you can paddle for five miles if you don’t mind the bats hanging overhead. Palawan has been called “the last unspoiled frontier,” although migration, logging, tourism, and poverty are today starting to take their toll.

For a New Tribes missionary pilot and his family, Palawan was a lonely assignment. They lived neither on a compound, like Aritao, nor in a city with other missionaries nearby, as we did in Malaybalay. They were all by themselves in a house beside the grass airstrip. They did everything, from buying supplies to keeping the books to maintaining the airplane to battling back the ever advancing foliage. Because the climate was even more tropical than the rest of the Philippines, they had to think more about malaria and dengue fever. We found that every time we went to Palawan, we came home exhausted.

It helped a great deal that Martin really believed in the value of family vacations. Even though we didn’t have a lot of money, he was always willing to spring for some wonderful getaways. Every year we went to Camiguin, a delightful little island that had been formed by a cluster of seven volcanoes. The only way to get there was by ferry. We’d spend a week just exploring and sitting on the white sand beach. It was so refreshing.

I always returned ready to get back to work—especially when I began to homeschool Jeff. I arranged a little desk for him right near my radio desk, so I could do both things at once if necessary. I ordered curriculum from Calvert, a well-known home-education supplier out of Maryland, and I also got some material from the missions co-op resource center on the island. As people’s kids moved from grade to grade, they passed along their books and other materials to those of us with younger ones.

If a textbook didn’t have a teacher’s manual or a workbook, I just made up my own; after all, I’d been an education major back at Calvary. And of course, I read aloud to the kids all the time.

During Jeff’s third-grade year, we took a break from homeschooling. Several of us mission families—New Tribes and Southern Baptists—got together and rented a jeepney to transport our kids each morning and afternoon to an SIL-Wycliffe school about thirty minutes away. Jeepneys are these brightly painted, colorful Philippine contraptions that look like military jeeps in the front but have benches on an extended flatbed in the back, with a metal roof overhead. They’re the local version of a minivan, only they’re open to the air and thus a lot more noisy.

* * *

Early one morning, Martin was flying an American businessman and another mission colleague to the city of Davao. As usual, I was at the radio; Jeff had just gotten up and was having a bowl of cereal on the other side of a row of bookshelves we used as a partition.

Martin’s voice crackled through the speaker. “Uh, Gracia, we have a problem here. . . .” Then the radio went silent.

I waited for the next word, but nothing came.

“Three-zero-nine, are you going to tell me what your problem is?” I anxiously radioed back.

“I’m losing engine power. There was a puff of smoke—I’m not sure what it was. I’m over the mountains right now and into the clouds; I’m trying to climb while I’ve still got power to get as much altitude as possible to work with. . . .” And then it was quiet again.

My palms began to sweat, and I prayed with all my heart.
Oh, God, help him know what to do!

At just that moment, a Filipino friend stopped by to return a book she had borrowed. I burst out, “On your way to work, pray for Martin! Something’s wrong!” She said she would.

I kept waiting for Martin’s voice. Still nothing. I yelled over the partition, “Jeffrey! Are you there?”

“Yeah.”

“Pray for Daddy! He’s in trouble in the airplane!”

“Okay, Mom.”

A few moments later I called again. “Jeff, Jeff—please pray for Daddy! He’s in trouble!”

My six-year-old called back with a touch of sternness in his little voice: “Mom! I prayed already!”

The little guy had faith that he had talked to God once—and that was adequate. He had gone on eating his breakfast.

A peace seemed to settle down upon me.
Okay, God—you’re going to take care of Martin, aren’t you?
Some ten minutes later, Martin called again. He had gotten out of cloud cover and could see the valley in front of him. By then the engine had seized up completely and the propeller had stopped, so he was gliding with no power.

“Gracia, I’m going to head for this Wycliffe base I see, the one at Nasuli. I think I might make it.”

Another four minutes of silence. I sat frozen to my chair.

Then: “Okay, I’m switching to Nasuli frequency to warn them that I’m coming. We’ll be out of contact for a little bit.”

Again, I held my breath.

“Gracia, we’re on the ground; I made a dead-stick landing,” he radioed. “There’s a whole ‘hallelujah meeting’ going on here! Everybody is out on the runway rejoicing.” He had cleared the last fence with a mere fifty feet of altitude left. The engine had pumped out all its oil through a hole in one of the lines—but my husband was safe.

I slumped down in my chair and just sat quietly for several minutes, thanking God for sparing his life.

A coworker drove to Nasuli to pick Martin up. Later as Martin walked in the gate, he glanced at his watch and said nonchalantly, “I told you I’d be back around ten, didn’t I?” We just looked at each other and laughed.

* * *

Like the first one, this term of service ran longer than the standard four years, because there was no one to take Martin’s place in the cockpit. Finally, in 1997 we got pilots for each island and went home again. We stayed in the States fifteen months because a plane needed to be rebuilt at the Arizona base and readied to go to the Philippines. Jeff was old enough to help in the hangar this time.