Days 12-15 - Jeff submits

AI generated podcast transcript:

Welcome to The STIMPACK Podcast.

STIMPACK is a Haiti-focused think tank and interventional NGO.

Hello, everyone.

Welcome back to The STIMPACK Podcast, 43 Days to Freedom series.

This is your host, Jeff Frazier.

Welcome back.

Let's do days 12 through 15 today.

I did want to make a point up front about something.

This is not a Christian podcast, right?

Obviously, my wife and I are Christians.

But we're not trying to convert anybody on this podcast.

That's not its intent.

Well, I suppose we are trying to convert you to join the fight for the freedom of millions of Haitians.

But we're not trying to convert you to Christianity.

But I do think it's really important for you to understand the lens through which we both view the world, my wife and I.

I would like to think that we're well-rooted in faith and reason.

You know, I'm a total science nerd.

The company that we had the most success with was a clinical research technology company, all medical research in the pharmaceutical industry.

I'm a big science guy, right?

But of course, also a faithful guy, too.

I'd like to think I've got a hand on both sides.

I think it's important for you to understand how often I am praying in captivity.

It's a lot, right?

It's a lot of prayer.

My theology suggests that we can talk to the God of the universe and that He can respond to us.

And that can be through the heart and mind, right?

So that's thoughts and feelings.

So asking God to guide me in my thoughts is a frequent prayer throughout the day, as I'm trying to decipher what to do and what not to do, and how to make choices, and how to stay out of trouble and not get hurt as best I can.

One of those prayer answers that I felt like I was getting, probably starting around day nine and certainly leading up to day twelve, is this kind of guilt around paying the hundred thousand.

I've mentioned before that that's obviously terrible to give a hundred thousand dollars to these gangs because they just buy guns and ammo with it and cause more terror.

It's also a horrible thing because you raise the price on the head of every American moving forward who's trying to work with these NGOs or do some other form of good in the country.

And so obviously you don't want to do any of that.

So I'm faced with confronting the option of paying large and fast or low and slow.

You know, I observed from a very close distance Stephanie's torture, which was horrible.

And I most certainly didn't want to trade positions with her.

Not that I ever could have, but that's a frightening prospect.

But I'm also, in the back of my mind, wondering what the male version of that torture is, right?

Haitians absolutely have some deference to women, and certainly the women were being treated differently than the men.

But I had yet to observe a male being tortured.

I had only heard the sounds coming from the opposing room.

So I don't really know what's happening over there, but I've certainly thought about it at length and tried to get my mind and body ready for that potential likelihood.

And then, of course, death is not out of the realm of possibility.

There's a lot of people who estimate about 20% of captives are murdered during their kidnapping.

Now, let's acknowledge the fact that I'm probably a high ticket item, and so it's unlikely they would like to kill me, but I don't presume rational behavior on these gangs at all.

Who knows?

Maybe one day the chef is feeling like he needs to pound his chest and prove himself or wants to make history of some kind.

So all these kind of thoughts go through my head as I'm trying to wrestle with this idea of paying a small amount and getting on board with what seems like my entire team on the outside is heading toward.

I keep seeing the text messages and voice messages and calls that I get from Gunny and Diego and of course Aaron, all kind of echoing this, initially the 7,000 number and then this odd 13,000 and change US dollars number.

And so this is kind of the wrestle that I'm having.

And then in my prayers, I feel like I'm getting the answer that I need to come off the 100k.

But of course, I'm afraid to do that.

And I'm deathly afraid to do that because I don't know what that means.

What is the fallout from me getting on board with that?

But the overriding thought that kept coming back to my mind was trust Diego.

Trust Diego.

And I, of course, didn't quite know what that meant.

I had been feeling that in kind of the back of my head for a few days leading up to day 12.

And I get on the phone with Diego on day 12, and he's got nothing but stonewalls for me on the call, right?

Wherein a few days earlier, he was my ticket out.

Now he's singing a totally different tune.

And I know now, I've heard from my wife and Austin and others, that it took them a while to get him in line and help him to see the wisdom of not paying big and fast.

He doesn't have experience in kidnappings in Haiti and was just trying to help me and do what I was requesting, right?

And then he understood that doing what I was requesting would be stupid.

It would likely have not gotten me out any faster and would have done all the harm that you guys now know about.

And so Diego got on board and had to be the one to essentially break that news to me, right?

Gunny had been trying, but not really trying.

It's important to understand who Gunny is.

So Gunny, I've mentioned to you, he runs a security company in Haiti.

He speaks Haitian Creole.

The guy's awesome.

Diego and I found him together.

We were actually interviewing assets in the country, former and current police officers, to do investigative work for us in the anti-child trafficking space.

And we had lined up a list of folks to interview for a few positions, and we're conducting those interviews at one of the local hotels in Haiti.

And we didn't like any of them.

But the guy who picked us up from the airport happened to be filling in for another guy, and it was Gunny.

Gunny was his boss's boss, and just for whatever reason, happened to take the opportunity that day to pick us up, and we hit it off with him from that point.

A great dude, very effective for us.

The reason I give you all that background is he's always worked for me.

I've been his paycheck.

And so now, there's this strange dynamic where I'm kind of bossing him around from inside captivity.

And he's just trying to help me.

He's just trying to do the right thing, but I'm kind of barking orders at him over the phone like, dude, why aren't you doing what I'm telling you to do?

And he's just caught in the middle.

I just feel terrible for him.

And now you've got Diego, who's on the phone with me on day 12, trying to break this news to me.

And he's also being told that he can't speak freely with me on the phone.

And it's just killing him.

I just listened to the audio 20 minutes ago on my computer.

And it's heartbreaking, because you can just hear in Diego's voice, he just wants to help me and recognizes the best way for him to help me is to not give me what I'm asking for.

And it's rough.

I'm going to take a break.

Okay, so remember the thought that kept coming back into my mind over the last few days was to trust Diego.

And so when he essentially hardballs that $13,000 number, or $10,000, I forget what he said over the phone, but the small number, like, hey, this is all we got.

And there's no other way to get more.

I got the message.

You know, I said the weirdest phrase on that phone call I was just listening when I was just listening to it a few minutes ago.

Once I had finally resigned emotionally on the phone call, it's only maybe a three-minute phone call, and at the end, you can tell I've given up on the big number and resigned to the fact that we're going to pay low and slow, or at least we're going to try.

And the phrase I said to Diego, I said, I can take a beating, but let's not waste it.

And I don't really remember what I meant by that.

It's a weird thing to say, but I think what I was saying to Diego is, hey, we're headed into some dark days, and I think I just wanted him to know.

Okay, so let's move on to day 14.

We'll talk a little bit more about that here in a second, but I want to talk about discipline of thought for a second.

You know, while you're in captivity, your brain can go down the tubes real fast.

You know, claustrophobia is a big deal.

False finish lines or false hope is a big deal.

I'm sure you can imagine the claustrophobia one.

You just kind of think of something else and not focus on the fact that you cannot get out of that cell, because that will drive you nuts.

But the false finish lines, I think, is a more prevalent issue.

You know, the false hope idea.

And there's a cool case study in Good to Great by Jim Collins where they talk about confronting the brutal facts or something like that.

And he uses a case study from POWs in World War II who would go crazy in these camps and end up either committing suicide or running toward the fence and suicide by escape, that kind of thing.

And a lot of their explanations around why those guys would go nuts in captivity.

I'm sure there's lots of reasons, but one of them was this idea that they kept putting these false finish lines out there or false hope, meaning, hey, we will for sure get out of this prison by fall.

And then fall comes around and they're not out.

Okay, well, we're definitely going to be out by Christmas.

And then Christmas comes and goes, and they're still not out.

And that repeated false finish line just messes with your brain.

It reminds me of being in the military.

They would do these events where you'd have to road march.

That's like hiking with military equipment on.

They call it road march for some reason.

For a long distance.

And you're supposed to go as fast as you can.

And they don't tell you what the distance is.

They say, don't make any significant left or right turns.

Go as fast as you can.

And don't be late.

Don't be light.

And don't be last.

Light is, there's a weight requirement.

They weigh your equipment when you get back.

Anyway, you're supposed to go as hard as you can.

And oftentimes, it looks like there's a finish line on the horizon, and you get to what you think is the finish line, and it's not.

You gotta keep going.

You might only be halfway through that race.

And gosh, that just messes with your head big time.

I'm sure there are other emotional impacts to those false finish lines that are above my understanding.

I do know that if you can, rather than picking a date out on the calendar and deciding that for sure you're gonna be out by that date and then focusing on that, and then that date comes and goes, and you have to experience the emotional devastation of that date coming and going, rather than doing that to yourself, if you can instead ask yourself, what can I do to make this moment a little more peaceful, a little more survivable, a little more pleasant?

How can I find meaning in this moment of suffering?

How can I make this moment a little less suffering and a little more pleasurable?

If you can ask yourself that question and come up with something clever to make that moment a little bit more pleasant, you're gonna be in a much better place.

And we were.

And so we would do things like tell stories about each other's children or spouses, and we all knew about how each other's spouses had met, you know, how their little romance story, their meet-cutes, right?

We knew everyone's children's names.

I've forgotten a bunch of them, but Stephanie never forgets any of them.

It was pretty funny when Mary surprised me by inviting Stephanie to Florida to visit us.

We all hung out for about a weekend.

Stephanie brought her whole family.

It was great, but my children were all shocked at how much Stephanie knew about each and every one of them.

I think we had a lot of time to try to distract our minds, and so all those story times were an effort to be disciplined about our thinking in order to not go nuts.

Or at least try to.

Another idea that I think was helpful was trying to find meaning in the suffering.

I mentioned I'm a Latter-day Saint, and our church's founder, Joseph Smith, back in the 1830s, had quite a few rough days.

One of those particularly rough days was in Liberty Jail, an ironically named jail in Missouri.

I've actually been there.

It's a historical site now, and it's a pretty solemn place.

The jail is underground, like in a basement, very dark, very small.

The ceiling, I want to say, is maybe five feet tall, so you can't stand up straight in there.

And he and his brother, and I believe one other gentleman, were in there for, I want to say, six months, maybe more than six months.

And there's a canonized writing of his that references that experience, but specifically is him talking to the Lord and then the Lord's response to him.

And when Joseph is writing to the Lord, it's essentially a complaint.

You know, he's having a hard time.

He's freezing cold, and he's starving, but most of the letter is about how bad things are outside the jail for his family and the church and his loved ones.

And they're experiencing tons of persecution, and people are being killed and tart and feathered.

It's rough, right?

And so he's complaining, and then God's response to him is pretty rough.

The Lord is essentially saying, are you better than Jesus Christ?

Are you better than Job?

Because those guys had it way worse than you.

And by inference, they needed their suffering to be educated in very specific ways.

It was part of their progress by inference.

And the Lord is essentially saying to Joseph, do you not need to progress in this way?

And so Joseph is kind of put in his place.

And I've always loved that set of scripture.

I really enjoyed it during hard times.

We all have our sob stories.

I always kind of identified with that in an effort to cope with my own kind of sob story growing up.

My parents were divorced early.

That was rough on us.

The cupboards were bare at times.

My mom remarried an abusive dude.

He eventually killed her when I was 14.

I was kicked out of my house at 17 because I was an obnoxious kid and deserved to be kicked out of the house and flailed around for quite a while.

Luckily, the army straightened me out.

I always joked that it took a literal army to get me back on track, but it worked.

But even after that, when Mary and I were building our business, the finances were rough, right?

We had many times where we had eviction notices on our home and on my offices, and there's rough stuff.

So when I would read this liberty jail experience and the Lord's reply to him, I was able to always find meaning in the suffering because I'm not as Job and I'm not as Jesus Christ, and I have a lot to learn, and so education can be had in that suffering.

And I, of course, very quickly while in captivity went to this liberty jail experience in my head and tried to be very disciplined about the education that I was getting while I was in there.

I'm no Joseph Smith or Job or Jesus, so I've got tons to learn, and I was trying to do my best to do that, and it definitely did help.

I actually have a notes section on my phone, the lessons from captivity.

And we won't talk about that here because it's all spiritually based, but you should know that from a mindset standpoint, that was extremely helpful every day to know what I was learning and to try to encapsulate that and really digest and ingest that education while I was in captivity.

Okay, so day 14 is all about escape talk.

So you may recall the last tactic was that I needed to figure out a way to spread those bars on the windows so that I could fit my head and chest through the bars.

And I couldn't figure out how to apply enough leverage to the bars to bend them, because I probably, I estimated would need around 12 to 1500 pounds of pressure to bend the iron bars.

I didn't know how to do that.

One of my ideas was to use the toilet basin lid as a thick ceramic, probably two inch thick ceramic lid.

And I thought maybe I could stick that through and then twist it and kind of pry open the bars that way.

But I wasn't able to express nearly enough leverage to twist those and figured that even if I could express enough leverage that it would just break the ceramic.

And the iron bars would win, so that wouldn't work.

So I shifted to trying to think of a way that I could use some sort of rope or wire or something to pull the bars closed and by implication, you know, open.

So if you close one hole, then you can open another, right?

So if you're pulling any bars together, you're also pulling two other bars apart.

So thinking through something around that kind of mechanism.

You know, there's in the army and in Boy Scouts, actually you learn how to make a tourniquet, which is essentially, you know, you're trying to stop extreme bleeding by wrapping cloth or a rope or anything around your leg, for example.

So imagine if your foot gets chopped off, we got to stop the bleeding.

You wrap a rope or a t-shirt or whatever around the leg and tie it.

Well, it's not very tight, but if you want that sucker to get really tight, you put a stick through or underneath that shirt or underneath that rope and parallel to the bone.

And then you twist that stick, hyper tightening your rope or t-shirt, whatever your tourniquet was around.

And so that same kind of logic was in the back of my head if I could, but I didn't have any rope or cables or anything like that.

So I'm trying to think of something I can use that would be like a rope.

And so I'm dinking around and I found in this closet right by the main door where the kidnapper's coming in and out of is like a circuit breaker closet, like an old circuit breaker closet that's partially in use now because it seems like maybe one or two of the circuits are being used, but the rest is all just extra wire.

And so I tried to see if there was any length of wire in there that might make sense.

And I was able to pull a couple of those wires off, but as you can imagine, copper wire is not nearly strong enough to do what I just described.

And so that wasn't working.

So I was laying on my mattress, looking up at the ceiling, and there's a ceiling fan up there, a broken ceiling fan with no blades.

But I was imagining the metal or the motor on the inside that would have had significant lengths of copper wire inside wound around the motors, thinking, well, that could be possible, but again, copper is just too thin.

But that idea of using many lengths of something to gain tensile strength kind of got my brain going and looking at our mattresses to see if there was something that could be used, because there's a ton of nylon used to make a mattress.

And I noticed that there was a ribbing, like a piping, around the outside of each of the mattresses.

Most mattresses these days are double-sided, and so both sides, so each mattress had two piping kind of lengths on the mattress.

And so that got me thinking.

And so I used a little piece of aluminum trash that we had to cut some of the piping off of one of the mattresses.

And thought that I would try that.

And I got maybe a five-foot length of it, and I wanted to measure its tensile strength.

And so I just pulled on it with my arms as hard as I could, and unfortunately it ripped.

And so that was discouraging, because it wouldn't be nearly strong enough to express that 1,200 pounds, 1,200 to 1,500 pounds that I think that I need.

So I was tempted to give up, but then I realized one of the mattresses was actually significantly newer and in better shape than the other mattresses.

So I went to that one and began cutting off a length of it to test its strength.

And once I did that and then tested it, I couldn't rip it.

And estimated it was probably a good 2 or 300 pounds that I was able to express, and it didn't rip.

And so I spent the rest of the day slowly and clandestinely cutting that ribbing off of the mattress and making rope out of it.

I asked Stephanie to keep an eye out for me.

I went into the bathroom.

I closed the door.

I removed the aluminum clips from the glass louvers on the window.

I removed the glass louvers from four or five of the sections, enough to give me space to work.

I put those on the window sill.

Thought about how I could quickly put those back on if needed, if I heard any commotion.

I then wrapped my nylon ribbing from the mattresses around the bars.

I remember I estimated each length of nylon to hold maybe 200, 250 pounds of tensile strength.

So I had several lengths around the bars, which should be plenty.

It should be maybe even two, maybe 2,500 pounds of tensile strength on the bars, potentially.

And then I used the curtain rod, the iron curtain rod.

It was maybe a quarter inch thick curtain rod.

It was probably 24 inches in length.

I bent it in half in kind of like a ribbing, like a Susan G.

Komen ribbon shape, if that makes sense.

So they kind of cross in the middle.

And then stuck that, both of those ends through the nylon ribbing that were wrapped around the bars, and began to spin it clockwise.

So, just to make sure you had the mental image, the bars run horizontal.

My nylon ribbing goes around those vertically, right?

Around and around and around.

And then my bar, my twisting bar, my tourniquet bar, then goes through the middle of those ropes.

And then I am able to spin that counterclockwise.

I guess you can go either way, but I'm pretty sure I'm counterclockwise.

And that gathers all of those nylon ribs and shortens them, which essentially expresses upward and downward force on two bars.

It's essentially pulling them together.

And I start to twist them, and it's moving a little bit.

I'm worried that it's moving, and as soon as I release this tourniquet, that they're just going to return to their original shape.

So I start cranking my tourniquet, and it is pulling it down.

The nylon ribbing is about to start ripping.

I can hear it kind of fraying a little bit.

And I also am hearing the guards kind of rustling.

I can hear their voices coming closer.

You don't know if they're coming in the room or not, but the fact that they're even in earshot is concerning.

But I'm really determined to get the answer to this experiment.

So I give it another couple of turns.

I hear the nylon ripping further, and then I back out.

And I untwist the ribbing and pull, or excuse me, untwist the tourniquet and pull the ribbing off.

And I look at the bars, and I've bent them.

Probably a quarter inch on both bars.

And from that point forward, I knew how to get out.

I knew that I could just do that over and over again.

Until I had enough space, I estimated I needed about 10 to 12 inches of gap.

And I was confident that I could get that with repeatedly doing what I had just done.

So from that moment on, I always knew I could get out, and I cannot overstate the value emotionally of knowing that you can get out.

It's the antidote to that claustrophobia issue.

And I let Stephanie know that I now knew how to get out, and I could bend the bars, and really enjoyed the peace of knowing that I could get out.