Twenty-six years ago this October, Loy and Ludy Maturan, now of Juneau, were leaving their home in the Philippines with their 7-month-old granddaughter when armed men stopped their car. As Loy radioed for help, one of the men pistol-whipped him, he lost consciousness, and the trio’s almost week-long ordeal began.
Now, 26 years later, the Maturans have written a book about it, which they’ve titled “Kidnapped by Muslim Rebels.” They’re self-publishing, and say it should be out within a few weeks.
“We could not have decided to publish earlier for security reasons,” said Loy, now 85. Ludy is 81. “Now, we believe that we are safer here, in America.”
Ludy, a teacher, was wearing heels when the couple was kidnapped and ended up walking barefoot for miles in the woods. She was trying to carry their granddaughter but having a hard time walking barefoot over thorny ground, so one of the rebels took her.
“”I kept on looking and trying to find out whether the baby is alive,” she said. “And then the baby cried, and I was so happy. That means she’s alive. And it was good, because if I keep the baby, both of us would have died in that mountain full of thorns.”
The couple was kidnapped because their kidnappers wanted money; they asked for 1 million pesos (at the time, the equivalent of around $25,000) and two radio sets. They ended up being released for two radios and 25,000 pesos for “reimbursement of expenses.” After they were released, some of their kidnappers approached them asking for the “unpaid ransom money,” which is part of the reason the couple had to leave.
The book in which they tell their story is in five sections, and is mostly written by Loy, from his perspective. The first, “Our Macedonian Call,” describes Loy’s decision to become the president of Dansalan College, a self-described “prestigious Basic Educational Institute” founded by missionaries in what is now the Islamic City of Marawi, the only Islamic city in the Philippines.
He writes that he felt God was “calling me to Marawi to serve Him there among the Muslims to provide a Christian education for their youth.” (Though the majority of the school’s students are Muslim, the majority of its faculty is Christian, and it also describes itself as “a Muslim-Christian partnership.”)
The second chapter describes the lead-up to their abductions.
For years prior to the kidnapping, the family was harassed by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), who sent increasingly aggressive letters asking for “donations,” sometimes in order to guarantee the safety of the couple’s children.
The prior president’s term ended with his kidnapping in 1979, 10 years before the Maturans’ ordeal. Part of the reason Loy was recruited for the job was because the college’s board believed a Filipino president would be less likely to be abducted.
The third chapter, with one account written by Loy and another by Ludy, describes their ordeal once kidnapped; the fourth describes negotiations the couple wasn’t privy to at the time, and the fifth, aimed at those who might find themselves kidnapped in the same region (it’s a relatively common occurrence) offers four “lessons” aimed at resolving the situation as positively as possible.
“It was hard to forget the horrible experience we have had,” Loy said. “Should it happen now, we would have died… we were going over streams, wetland, logs in the forest. And we were thankful that during the nights we were in captivity, the weather was good, although in the Philippines, October and November is a typhoon month. When we were captured — abducted — the weather was good, and the sky was starry. That was kind of a divine provision for us.”
There were other moments of goodness along the way. Some of the people that cared for them and cooked them food – local people – boiled water from the lake and mixed it with condensed milk for the baby. Many of those people treated them very kindly, they said.
Their Christian faith is central to how both of them dealt with the kidnapping.
“It was threatening, but I absorbed everything, and I felt the presence of God,” Ludy said.
When they were kidnapped, they were members of the city’s Rotary and Radio clubs. Most of the other members — fellow teachers, lawyers, doctors and government officials — were Muslim. Those friends were a huge part of the reason the three were released when they were.
“I credit them with negotiating with our abductors,” Loy said. “Negotiations with Christians would take a longer time. That happened to my predecessor.”
The president before Maturan was kidnapped for 21 days.
Maturan was also chaplain for the Iligan City chapter of Gideons International, an evangelical Christian association, and believes that the group’s prayers helped the three receive help from God.
After they were released, they filed for political asylum in California in 1991. Now, they’re U.S. citizens.
They hope to publish their book, which will sell for between $25 and $30, by the end of October. Loy also plans to revise it within the next few years; the last third of the book is letters, clippings from newspapers and telegrams, but they’re still waiting for permission to include all of them.
Loy also plans to write a sequel to “Kidnapped by Muslim Rebels” about the couple’s arrival in Juneau, largely through close family friends who lived here.
Many in Juneau have heard about their ordeal, but Ludy doesn’t like to talk about it — it makes her cry to think of the family they now see more rarely.
“I would rather go to the room, lay down and read,” she says. “Here, we are happy, but there are only two of us. That is sad.”
One of their sons lives in New York; a niece lives in Texas. The 7-month-old granddaughter kidnapped along with them, Trixzy Kay Maturan, is now married, has a 2-year-old child, and is expecting another.
The couple visits the Philippines as often as they can, but have to “play incognito as much as possible,” Loy said.
The experience has made Loy think about Muslim-American relations in the Philippines, and in the United States, where he sees it becoming a larger issue.
“I believe that the earlier we conduct a dialogue where we can accept the other for what we are and what we are not — unless we accept that fact –— we will continue to have problems,” he said.
• Contact Capital City Weekly staff writer Mary Catharine Martin at maryc.martin@capweek.com.
