Days 16-27 - Lots of Changes

AI generated podcast transcript:

Welcome to The STIMPACK Podcast.

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

Thank you for listening.

And hello, this is Jeff Frazier.

Welcome back to The STIMPACK Podcast, 43 Days to Freedom series. Sorry, it's been a while since we posted something.

The last day we left off was 15.

We'll pick up on day 16, and we'll see how many days we can get.

Hopefully, we can get all caught up and posted today.

But one of the things I wanted to mention, way back early in my captivity, I began to be fearful of something.

We, my wife and I decided probably about eight years ago, eight or nine years ago, that we would like to adopt, to add to our family.

We were very active in the anti-trafficking space and knew the value of rescuing kids out of hopeless situations where they were likely to be exploited for their entire lives.

And Haiti was one of the hot spots in the world for that.

You know, there's a lot of places around the world that are terrible for children.

Haiti is particularly hopeless for many.

There's probably somewhere between, and I know it's a broad estimate, 200,000 and 800,000 abandoned children.

So that could be anything from living on the street to living in a nice orphanage and everywhere, everything in between.

And so us being aware of that situation would begin to work toward adoption.

And then 2018, our first trip down to Haiti, we actually visited several orphanages to kind of understand that a little bit further, understand that process and the situation that they were in.

And of course, once you start touring some of these orphanages and see the circumstances that these children live within, your heart changes forever and you can't unsee those things.

And so she and I began to work vigorously around 2018, late 2018, to adopt from Haiti.

And so that's a several year process.

And in 2021, I believe, no, 2022, we were matched and that essentially means that the American government and Haitian government have considered all your paperwork and deemed you eligible to be an adoptive family.

And then they actually pair you with real children.

And so in somewhere in late 2022, my wife and I were what's called matched.

And that essentially means that the government has found specific children for you to adopt.

You give them some guidelines.

So we said we wanted children, a sibling set under 10.

And we were matched with a set of three children who at that time two, four and seven.

And we're thrilled.

And so we were matched with those kids, which is great.

That means you can go down and start visiting with them and bonding with them and that whole thing.

So we began to do that.

So we had seen them in country several times, well, myself several times.

Once Mary went down with me, it was great.

We were working as hard as we could to get those kids out of Haiti as fast as we could.

So when I was taken in April, one of my biggest fears was that the kidnappers would figure out that I was adopting Haitian children and would look at my photos of those children and then notice on location services where they were, and would figure out I was adopting kids and go kidnap them.

And my worst fear is that they would walk in through that door and be captive with me.

Then their leverage increases significantly.

So that was always a deep fear of mine.

Luckily, they never figured that out.

And so when I got out, we continued to work on the adoption process.

Fast forward to now in 2024, as things have continued to spiral downward in Haiti, things have become increasingly dangerous for my children there.

Not because they're mine, but because they're in Haiti.

And they were several times caught in the crossfire, literally crossfire bullets flying into their bedrooms.

And so we were deeply fearful for our children.

Luckily, they started sleeping downstairs and were less in danger, but always in danger of some kind.

And many orphanages around the country would be ransacked and then extorted for money because they know they have Western backers.

So we were always extremely fearful and began to lobby the US government to get our children, as well as any matched children out of Haiti.

So if they had international adopted families that were ready to take them and they were already matched and vetted families, we wanted to push hard to get them out of there.

So luckily, a couple of weeks ago, we finally got approval and had essentially finished our adoption process, got approval to get the children out, which is wonderful.

The problem is the gangs had already overtaken the airport in Port-au-Prince.

So we didn't have any easy way to get them out.

So luckily, we were able to arrange for a helicopter to pick them up.

This was last Monday, so today is Monday.

So last Monday, we were stressed all morning as we waited for our escort to safely make it from his home to our crash, which is not a safe journey.

Crash is a French word for orphanage, specifically for younger children.

Made it to the crash, picked up our children, and then made it safely to the landing zone, where the helicopter could then meet them and then safely take off and fly to the Dominican Republic, to Santo Domingo, where they were able to get on a plane.

And then late Monday night, our family was able to meet them in the Miami airport.

And so we're thrilled to now have them with our family physically and begin the healing process for those children and the bonding process for all of our family.

It's been an absolute dream since they've been here.

So if you happen to hear kid sounds in the background, that's what that is.

We've got our Haitian children are here now.

It's been amazing.

So that's the reason why it's taken us so long to get another episode out.

We've been busy.

So that's the reason why we might not hear so much from Mary in the back half of this series, because somebody's got to give me time to get in front of this camera.

But I understand you would much rather hear from her.

So we'll do our best to try to free up some of our time to come and talk to you guys.

But thanks for your patience.

And waiting for us to get another episode out.

Okay, so around day 16, I started feeling this pain in my shoulder.

And I know a little bit about medicine and know that heart attacks often start with a pain right around there.

It's kind of underneath here in your armpit.

Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention to those of you who are listening on the traditional podcast and not watching this video, I'm starting to do video.

So I'm trying to increase our production value a little bit.

And I heard that YouTube is a popular place for podcasts to get some extra eyeballs.

And so we're trying to do this.

We'll see if we can stick with it because it's a bigger pain.

So we'll see.

Anyway, this is a video.

So I was just pointing to my shoulder and realized that many of you can't see that.

Anyway, I started feeling this pain and every day it was growing stronger.

And so it started to stress me out thinking I might be feeling the early onset of a heart attack.

And by day or the morning of day 19, early in the morning, it was really bad.

And so it had progressed toward my chest and I started feeling sharp pains in my chest.

And so I was pretty certain that I was having a heart attack and knew that there was no chance that anyone was ever gonna help me while I was in there.

And so that was pretty frightening.

And so on the morning of day 19, probably four or five in the morning, I'm somehow showing my pain because Stephanie spots me.

And I don't know why she was awake, but she was awake and noticed that I was writhing or somehow displaying my pain.

And so I tell her, and she amazingly jumps into action, right?

Literally jumps up and says, I'm gonna knock on Chef Jeff's door.

That's something you never do, right?

And, but she does, she knocks and then knocks again, and he barks, you know, what do you want?

And she says something about the condition that I'm in, and he comes in and actually looks concerned, and clearly is trying to decide whether or not this is a ruse, right?

Is this some sort of act to try to escape or try to get out or try to get released early?

But he seems convinced that I'm in trouble, and I am, and so I see him leave and kind of come back and then leave again.

He's clearly trying to decide what to do, and then maybe 30 minutes later, he comes back, he says, I'm gonna go ask my chef, my boss, what we should do.

So he disappears.

Stephanie's convinced that that's my ticket out, and of course, I'm hopeful that maybe they don't want me to die here, right?

Because if you consider the calculus they're weighing is they don't want to lose their investment, right?

They don't want me to be dead, and because then they definitely don't get any ransom.

And if I die on their watch, they're gonna, my team is gonna assume that they killed me, or at least didn't provide care, and then they're gonna get the blame for it from a political standpoint and fear some sort of retribution.

So it's not trivial to let me die, but it's also not a slam dunk that they would let me go either.

And so that, the fact that he takes off to maybe do something, and it's so early in the morning, which is hours before they usually start moving, because Chef Jeff is out till, probably till four o'clock in the morning to begin with.

He probably just went to bed, if he had gone to bed at all.

So, the fact that he took off to maybe go get some help is encouraging to me.

And so, I wait for a bit, and probably around eight or nine in the morning, he returns and says something like, they're going to try to find a doctor for you.

And that's encouraging.

At least it looks like they're gonna try to get me some help, or maybe they're just trying to verify if I'm really in trouble, or if I'm faking it, right?

But I don't know, of course.

Probably around 11 o'clock, I'm still in pain, and probably getting a little bit worse, but not significantly worse.

I feel it probably peaked around eight or nine.

And Chef Jeff starts cooking, which I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before in the podcast, but this is something he does out of guilt.

So if ever he's done something cruel to someone, or someone's had a bad day, and maybe their money got lost, or they were tortured, he'll cook for them.

Right?

And my assessment is that he does that out of guilt.

It's some strange sort of emotional response to make himself feel better about what he's done.

So when he comes in and starts cooking for me, I know that that's not a good sign.

And so that day goes on, and we continue to wait and wait for the doctor, and I'm still in pain, although slightly diminishing over time.

I'm laying to my side, and it seems to be making it better.

I don't move a muscle.

And nobody ever comes.

But by late that evening, by late that evening, I'm starting to feel a little better to where I can sit up without that sharp pain in my chest.

And of course, I've been praying the whole day through, please don't let me die here.

And I didn't.

And over the few days following that, I would get progressively better.

I would figure out if there was a certain way that I could hold my arm that would, I don't know, maybe allow blood to flow better.

And it wouldn't send that sharp pain to my chest.

And I got better, which was great.

I'll take a pause there.

Okay, so on day 20, I'm feeling a little bit better, and I'm thrilled to get my phone again.

Chef Jeff brings in my phone.

And I see that there is a bunch of texts from Erin, from Gunny, from my wife, from Diego, and they all point to this guy, Billy.

They say, hey, you need to accept this guy, Billy, as your negotiator and introduce him to Chef Jeff, and then get out of the way.

And you may recall my conversation with Diego somewhere around day 15, where I felt impressed to trust him and did.

And then when I get my phone again on day 20, there's all these messages to introduce Billy, right?

And you may recall that Gunny was my primary negotiator.

And now Gunny and everyone else is saying, use this Billy guy.

And I don't know who Billy is.

And so I call Diego and I say, hey, who's this Billy dude that everybody's talking about?

And Diego says, I don't know him, but I know that your wife and your team really wants to use him.

And so you should.

So while I'm on the phone with Diego, I get a call from Billy.

And who, well, a strange number.

And I pick it up and all I tell Diego, hey, hold on a second.

I think this might be this Billy guy.

I gotta recognize the area code from the text messages.

And so I get on the phone with him.

He says, hey, this is Billy.

I said, okay, tell me who you are, right?

Because everybody says that I should use you as my negotiator.

Like, who are you?

So he gives me a bit of his background and how he was introduced to my family and his skillset.

And none of it really matters to me because the reality is I just trust the fact that my team is all pointing to him.

And so I relent.

And I pop back over to Diego and tell him, okay, I'm gonna use this Billy guy.

And then I flip back over to Billy and we talked a little bit about strategy.

I talked a little bit about what was happening around me.

I can't imagine he believed much of it because they always thought that I was under duress and had a gun against my head and that the kidnappers spoke English, but they never did.

But we had that conversation.

I told him that he's really got to work hard on getting them to come off that $100,000 number because they haven't yet emotionally and they've got to start that grieving process.

And I could tell that at that point, they hadn't, right?

They were still absolutely committed to that number.

The key strategy being, please just blame the FBI and US Customs, the US government for not letting the money across the border and into Haiti, and that they're blocking the money, they're blocking the money.

That was the phrase that I would use with Chef Jeff repeatedly.

And the point being that that would shake the pressure off of me, right?

Literally don't shoot the messenger, right?

If I could present myself as the messenger and not the one trying to keep him from that $100,000, then maybe I get out of here.

And so that was the strategy we went with.

I handed the phone to Chef Jeff and wished him luck.

I also told him about this kind of cycle that I had witnessed wherein getting close to the weekends, they would become more desperate for money.

These guys spent money so fast.

As soon as they got it, they just blew it, right?

They think very much day to day.

That there's very little planning happening at this level.

And so you could spot the pattern where they, if they had let a captive go, they had received a ransom for that captive, they would have cash.

And then of course they would blow it, and then they would become increasingly desperate.

We would see less and less food, less water, that kind of thing.

And so I told Billy about that kind of sequence and that we were still pretty fresh off of somebody going home.

I feel like maybe it was Sarah that had just gone home recently, and maybe this doctor who was on the other side had gone home recently.

So we knew that it was unlikely that any of us were gonna get out in the next day or two, right?

You could feel that pattern.

And so I let Billy know that, and expected that we probably wouldn't have any sort of an accord for a while.

And so I gave him those tips and wished him luck.

So on day 21, we get a new captive.

James is probably in his mid-20s, married dude.

He was kidnapped coming out of his Digicel job.

You may recall Digicel is one of the biggest employers in Haiti.

They run the cell phone network, the biggest, arguably biggest cell phone network in Haiti.

He was kidnapped from the bus.

And he's going through all the same shock cycles that we've all gone through weeks ago.

And it's pretty rough, and we try to guide him and help him not freak out and help him understand the different phases and be supportive to him, but he's freaking out understandably.

It was somewhat entertaining the next day on day 22.

We kind of ran out of patience for him because we, the long timers now, I guess it's just Stephanie and I, the long timers have a system, right?

When things go in a certain place, we sweep in a certain way, we clean certain areas.

Anyway, James was wrecking all that and running out of patience for it.

For him, but also, of course, trying to help him navigate his grief cycle of being in captivity and the shock of that.

The most interesting thing about the new guy is he brings news.

So in the days previous, we had noticed an increase in battle, in gunfire and activity outside the window and guys running around with weapons and motorcycles going up and down the hill with soldiers loaded on the motos and didn't know anything about it or what was going on, but it felt like a different vibe.

And so when James showed up, he quickly asked if we knew what was going on outside and we said no.

And he introduced us to this movement called Bois Calais, spelled B-W-A-K-A-L-E.

Bois Calais literally translated as bald wood, but it's essentially by derivative reference like getting a switch or a stick to fight with, which by implication has become symbolic for vigilante justice or just do whatever it takes to get the job done or get the battle done or get your freedom won.

And so Bois Calais was a hashtag movement on WhatsApp and other social media in Haiti to inspire Haitians to rise up against the gangs that had been holding them captive.

And it was working.

It was in many cases being run by women.

It was led by women or inspired by women.

And it was incredibly gruesome.

I mean, this is stonings and burnings and you name it.

They were gruesome trying to send a message to these gangs.

One of the key ones, I forget which day this happened.

You could Google it.

But the first word that we heard was, he told us of the story of this group up in Village de Dieu, this neighboring village, where the gang was particularly violent toward the people.

And they essentially pushed them out.

And as the gang was fleeing, the police caught them trying to escape their own town.

And so when the police got them, they actually brought them back to the town and the town burned them alive.

I think it was 14 or 17 gang soldiers.

Then they burned them in the street.

And then with that momentum, continued to push forward and we're coming our way toward where we were because it's all affiliated gangs.

And so that battle momentum was pretty intense.

And so we would hear that out of our window and we finally got an explanation of that.

And it was clear that the soldiers around us were worried.

They all knew about the burnings and Bocquelet and the movement, and they were pretty stressed.

And many gangsters were on the run.

And we would look out our window.

I remember seeing a lot of the soldiers, the gang soldiers wearing women's clothes.

So they were wearing that as a disguise.

So actually wearing women's wigs and dresses and would sneak around outside with those, hoping to not get shot for some reason, thinking that they were women.

But those were terrible disguises.

I can't imagine anybody who was convinced.

So I started to hear about that.

And then I'll do some on Mary's part here, because she won't be recording on this episode.

But she mentioned that they were hearing about Bois Calais as well, that my team was hearing about it.

And we're actually wondering if Stephanie and I and the other captives were out on the run, right?

Because they were hearing that the gangs were on the run, so to speak.

And it's hard to get any good information out of those kind of war zones.

So there was a lot of speculation.

And I can only imagine what that was like for my team on the outside.

But that's what was happening.

And then of course, Stephanie and I are kind of thrilled, right?

Because it feels like maybe there's some pressure on the gang.

And maybe we will get out.

Maybe they will want to get rid of us or move us or who knows, right?

But it felt like something was happening and something was different, you know?

So that was a bit exciting.

And then on day 23, I believe it was, a little comic relief.

James is in the shower on his, that's his third day.

And so the shower is like, it's actually a shower stall, but there's just a bucket in there with a cup, right?

And on the days we had water, you could shower with it.

And James was using too much water as normal.

So frustrating, Stephanie and I.

But right as he's in the middle of the shower, Rasta comes in and says, hey, James, get your shoes.

And that means he's getting out.

And Stephanie and I are, of course, astonished that he would be getting out so fast.

And I've never seen James move so fast.

He comes bursting out of the shower and out of the bathroom, totally nude, not one stitch of clothing on.

He's grabbing his clothes.

He's going to run out.

And Rasta's like, whoa, dude, put your clothes on first.

It does.

So I don't know if you've ever tried to put clothes on when you're dripping wet, but it's not easy.

And so he's standing there just struggling to put his clothes on as fast as he can.

And as you know, in that kind of a situation, trying to go fast is not helpful, right?

It just makes things more difficult.

But anyway, he struggles through it.

Stephanie's looking away, and she happened to have her back to the bathroom door at that time.

And she looks at me and she says, is he nude?

Yeah, he's totally nude.

Just keep looking this way.

And anyway, we're thrilled for him.

And I should say, in reality, thrilled for ourselves because we were done with James as well.

Happy for him to go out, but of course, super jealous that he only had to spend essentially three days in there.

We would learn from Rasta later that another gang leader had called for him, which is code for, you know, somebody at Digicel has an arrangement with a gang leader that you can't take their people, right?

They for sure pay dearly for that arrangement, and then favors are traded and you get out.

But we were happy to see him go, and of course, happy for him.

And we watched him walk in his wet clothes down the hill, and walked to freedom.

They, from what we heard, they put him on a bus and sent him out.

That was the end of James.

Okay, so that brings us to day 24, and this one can get a little confusing.

So I'm gonna do my best to try to explain it, but it is confusing.

And so if you get lost, I'm sorry, but I understand, because it's a mess.

So this is the story of Stephanie's money getting lost, quote unquote.

And so just to back up a little bit, you may recall I've mentioned the guard's name Rasta.

So that's the guy with the pot leaf hat, right?

And he always wears it when he comes in.

And he's been quite friendly and would often actually bring us a phone to use.

And I would never use it, but all the other captives would, because they were just calling Haiti phone numbers that they had memorized.

And so it's a tiny little, not even a flip phone, right?

This tiny little pay by the minute phones that most Haitians have.

And they would hand it to Stephanie amongst others.

Occasionally, they would be able to get ahold of either their negotiator or their family.

And one of those days, he brought, well, on day 24, he brings in the phone to Stephanie with a very concerned look on his face.

Like, hey, I think there's been a problem.

And Stephanie's like, what?

And she gets on the phone with either her mom or her negotiator.

And that, whoever is on the other phone, tells Stephanie that they've paid a ransom and they didn't bring her.

They didn't bring Stephanie.

Like, there was a failed ransom attempt.

And so this isn't coming from Chef Jeff.

And so it's not like official word, right, that the money's been lost.

Like, it's confusing.

Stephanie's freaking out and is devastated, obviously, because they paid the money and how come you're not letting me go?

And this is coming from Rasta, like this side guard guy.

And so later that day, Chef Jeff comes in freaking out.

Oh, so they have to come up with a story, meaning Rasta and Stephanie come up with a story to even bring it up to Chef Jeff that they even know about it, right?

And so I believe it was Stephanie claims that she had a dream or something that her money was lost.

And I think that was the cover story.

And so Rasta shares that with Chef Jeff, and Chef Jeff then calls Stephanie's negotiator and says, hey, did you pay money to someone?

And the family of course says, yes, you know that we paid.

And bring us Stephanie.

How come you're not bringing Stephanie?

And Chef Jeff then starts storming all over the place, like, oh no, oh no, the money's been lost.

I'm gonna be in so much trouble.

I'm gonna be shot, because I lost the money, because you guys were dumb and you paid it to somebody else, but you're gonna get me my money again, right?

Like basically this whole charade to get Stephanie's family to pay twice, right?

But we on the inside, we know the money's been stolen, but we're not, again, not sure if it's some sort of subterfuge.

Did Rasta steal it, or did someone else steal it, or did, who knows, right?

But Stephanie's obviously absolutely devastated, right?

She doesn't know where her money is.

She definitely doesn't know where her family's gonna come up with another amount like that, because it's a significant amount.

And so she's just dumbfounded.

And then, to make matters worse, they're accusing her of having a phone, because they kind of don't believe the dream story, right?

So how could you have known?

Okay, so all that's confusing and sad.

But to further confuse the situation, what we learn later is that her family actually paid the money to Rasta.

That's who actually received it.

So whether or not he stole it from the group, and then created this whole ruse situation, which would surprise me, because if he was found out, he would be instantly dead.

Or did the gang come up with this whole story to somehow convince the family that it was lost and not stolen?

I don't know.

It's a total mess.

But that's what happened.

Her money was lost, and we learned about that.

We will later come to find out that they paid several times, and still didn't get her out for quite some time.

So we're on a very low, low with Stephanie, because she's essentially starting over.

And then on day 27, something interesting starts to happen.

So Chef Jeff comes in and says, or maybe on day 26, he tells us this, but I think it's the morning of 27.

He comes in and announces that he's been fired, and that Rasta is gonna be the chef, and Bad Cop is gonna be the chef.

The two of them together are essentially replacing Chef Jeff, and that he's gonna go fight in battle instead.

In retrospect, I don't believe he was fired.

I believe he just was sick of being a kidnapper, and had lobbied himself out.

But what he did was he used the excuse of, hey, I lost your money, and so they fired me.

I think it's all just a story.

I don't know why they feel like they need to lie to us.

They have all the leverage.

They could just tell us the truth.

Yeah, we stole your money.

Tough, but they don't.

They come up with these elaborate stories, and maybe they enjoy it.

So Chef Jeff disappears, and we don't see him again.

He still lives in that room, but, well, we see him outside the window, but he doesn't come in.

And so on day 27, something exciting happens, but also terrifying at the same time.

So what we figure out is everyone's negotiations that Chef Jeff was working on, they start over.

And so everyone gets a new demand, and bad cops, we call them bad cops, because the two of them, Chef Rasta and Chef Two, is what we initially called them.

So internally, we call them Chef Rasta and Chef Two.

Externally, meaning my team always knew them as good cop and bad cop, because when I got on the phone with my team, I believe on day 27 with Billy, bad cop brings me my phone, and Billy's like, dude, what happened?

Like, yeah, a lot's happened.

So we got these two new chefs, Chef Jeff is gone, and now you got this good cop, bad cop thing happening with these two new guys, right?

And so from then on, he was known as bad cop with my team, and then good cop with Chef Rasta.

And so bad cop is an absolute nut job and is always yelling on the phone and yelling at us and waving guns around and super violent.

And Chef Rasta is always super mellow and seems like he's high most of the time.

So that's that kind of dynamic.

So that's all happening on day 27, that changing of the guard, so to speak.

And so everyone's negotiations start over as well.

So Chef Jeff obviously is not keeping any sort of notes or a spreadsheet on anybody.

And so he doesn't hand off anything except the physical phones and the humans, right?

So everyone's negotiations are starting over.

And some of the captives were actually really close on the other side, the other room full, including my security guys, who were both still over there.

And I believe two other dudes.

And so that's exciting and terrible at the same time.

Exciting because it finally feels like we have some momentum because Chef Jeff was never around, right?

The guy hated being a kidnapper.

And so everyone's kind of thrilled and terrified at the same time, including my team.

Let's take a breath there.

Okay, so backing up a little bit.

Day 24, 25-ish, Stephanie and I were seriously considering our escape plans and wanted to solidify that.

Earlier in captivity, maybe a week or so, maybe 10 days earlier, we had figured out that we could knock on the bathroom wall, the concrete wall, and that the other captives could hear us knocking, and they would come to their external window, and I could speak out our external bathroom window, and they could hear us, right?

And because we could see through the door to where the kidnappers were, we could see if the coast was clear, if nobody was close by, then we could chat back and forth and send messages.

And one of those messages that I sent was to ask if anybody over there was interested in escaping with us, if we found a way, because we had several options.

And they considered it for about a day, and then essentially said, heck no.

And please don't do it yourself, because we'll all get shot.

And that, of course, is a huge concern, but I wanted to give them the opportunity.

If we decided, if they wanted to come with us, I could get them out too, through the same method.

So as things were getting worse, and then Stephanie's money was lost, and she was becoming more hopeless, and then was continuing to be beaten one time, because they claimed that she had a phone and was hiding a phone.

That was bad cop who came in and was determined to make her admit how she got a phone call, or how she knew about the money being lost.

Anyway, things going downhill, my desire to protect her, and then of course feeling somewhat hopeless about my cause, we were getting more serious about escape plans.

And so, as I mentioned in previous episodes, we knew how to get out the window.

So then what?

So you may recall we're inside a walled compound, about a 15 foot high wall and then razor wire, but there's outside our window, maybe 50 feet is a mandor.

It's a metal kind of hinged mandor, really loud, too loud, slides across gravel, the way that they would get in and out of it.

And so you could always hear when somebody would open it or close it, but most of the time it was just left open.

And we could see gangsters going in and out of that door, including the gangs, families, women and children.

And so we had eyes on that door and believed that that was our best route out of the compound, because obviously it's close and you don't have to go through a half a mile of compound in order to get out through other directions that we didn't really know much about.

So I could see that main door.

Right outside that door is very dense shanty town, right?

Concrete and tin roofs and just a labyrinth of that for quite a while.

So I could see over the top of the 15 foot wall from our window.

And as I looked across the top of that wall, I could see homes and those homes went up the hill, right?

They're kind of stacked on top of each other.

And then the hill, the houses stop and the hill continues and that's grass and then trees.

And with my military background, I was confident if I could get to that tree line, I'd be gone.

Right?

You're not gonna find me, including Stephanie, presuming that she would still be a captive when I escaped.

I obviously wouldn't leave her behind.

And so as we were considering an escape, that seemed like a pretty reasonable exit strategy is to go out the window, then somehow get through that man door, then you're in the village.

And assuming that you did that late at night, you could get up to the tree line.

Now, when I was looking across to that tree line, I was looking outside the wall and to the houses, to that tree line, it was about 800 meters from our window to that tree line in a straight line.

But I'm trying to explain this so you can imagine it.

That tree line ran toward us, right?

So that we were, I was looking west and there's a hill behind us to our south.

And so presumably, if I go out that door and I look to the left, the tree line will actually be quite a bit closer than 800 meters, right?

Because I just went out that wall and then I looked to my left, it should just be maybe 100 meters away, right?

Maybe 150 meters away from me if I go out that man door and then up the hill.

So that should be a pretty simple escape plan to get to the tree line.

And so I don't know if that's true because the center block wall blocks it from my view.

And so I can only surmise that it's close, but that's a pretty important part of our escape plan.

And so I try to figure out a way to be more certain that when I get out that wall, if I look to the left, there should be a tree line pretty close.

And the only way that I can determine whether or not I'm correct in my hypothesis is I try to count the people who go in and out that door.

And so for the next day or so, I count everyone that comes in and out that man door and determine that if more people make a right out that man door, then they must live and work down to the right and that there is less to do to live and work to the left.

So I count people that go to the right versus people that go up and to the left.

And it was 80-20, right?

80% of the people went down to the right and only 20% went up and to the left.

And that felt like it was reaffirming or confirming my assertion that the tree line was pretty close.

That was because there was nothing to go to up to the left.

So that made us believe that we had a decent shot at a plan that could work.

So we knew how to get out the bars, then we have to figure out how to get from the house through that man door without being spotted and then make a left.

And we're 150 meters or so from the tree line and we're golden.

And so that was the plan that we started working toward.

We started also trying to get some exercise.

And so we would pull the mattresses away from the walls and then walk around.

We tried to walk a mile or two each day because if we went, we're gonna have to walk quite a ways.

And so we were preparing for the escape potentiality that way.

So that was, I'll take us to day 27.

And then day 28 is when it gets gnarly.

And I'll save that for the next episode.

Thanks guys, appreciate you tuning in.