Monique’s a true survivor
NEXT Thursday marks the 15th anniversary of Monique Strydom’s release as an Abu Sayyaf hostage in the Philippines, where she was held captive with her husband Callie for four months in 2000.
The experience left Monique anything but bitter. In fact, it gave her the perspective and drive to do work for the greater good and win many awards for her humanitarian effort in the process.
Monique is uncharacteristically late for her Friday Files interview and jokes that Telkom was holding her hostage while she waited for the network to restore her services at the offices where she is the chief executive of the NGO, Matla A Bana.
It’s Monique’s way: her infectious laugh and positive attitude belie the trauma she experienced as a hostage and the scale of the project she has currently undertaken.
Monique remembers her experience as a hostage vividly. She and Callie were adventurers seeking the next thrill. It was 2000 and the couple had been married for 15 years when they went on a scuba diving holiday in Malaysia. They were taken captive, along with 19 other hostages – many of them tourists and some journalists – from all over the world.
The hostages were taken to the remote island of Jolo in the southern Philippines and faced the daily threat of being killed. It became home to Monique and Callie for 127 days.
The day before her release Monique had an epiphany.
“It was a Saturday and it was the end of the negotiations because at that stage the Libyans said they were pulling out (of the negotiations). It looked very grim for us, it looked like the military was going to attack us.
“I had two pieces of paper left so I wrote my testament, closed it and said I’m going to send this out. It was quite a funny testament because I left the patio set to somebody and the microwave to someone else.
“I had a dream that night and God said to me, ‘You will be released.’ I woke up the next morning and I said to Callie, ‘We will be let out.’
“I took that piece of paper and I wrote a business plan for a charity because God said to me I must come back and help people in South Africa.
“At 11am that morning I said to him that I could now be released because I knew why I had to be here. At that stage there was no talk of release and at 2 o’clock that afternoon they walked in and said ‘you’re free’, and I was released on that Sunday.”
Monique says the hostages found strength in their diversity. Callie played a crucial role in the mental well-being of the captives. She says Callie is not a “public person” but he has fortitude and inner strength in abundance.
For Monique, though, it was an emotional roller coaster.
“Callie is the chartered accountant and I studied drama,” she says, bursting into a fit of laughter.
“Callie was the kind of stable, solid one and I was the typical female that had many ups and many downs. I was upset many days and I cried many days. He was really the spiritual leader of the group.
“It was interesting to see where people excelled. The Finns and the rest of the Europeans really struggled with the fact that they were without food and having to live in those conditions. They used to say to us, ‘They’re Africans, they’re used to this kind of thing’.
“So the Finns would look after the food; their main focus would be not dying of hunger. Our main focus was on getting out.”
Callie was released a day after Monique. The couple has been married for 30 years now and there is an unbreakable bond.
“If you can live with your husband or wife for 24 hours, all the time, for four months and the relationship is still going…” she says with that trademark laugh again.
“It’s been exciting, an adventure and full of blessings. I think that’s the most important thing. If you do what you’re meant to do, you’ll be extremely blessed. And we are really extremely blessed.
“We had a baby, so that in itself is a challenge, hey. He’s in Grade 8. Science, maths and chemistry is not for a mother.”
But Monique’s journey to make a difference in South Africa was only just beginning.
On their return to South Africa, Monique closed down her business and the couple established the Callie and Monique Charity Trust. A year later, Monique would find her special focus: Matla A Bana, a civil society movement against child rape and abuse.
“It was the time of the Baby Tshepang rape. A magazine asked me to do a petition to the government. I said I wasn’t happy to do a petition because I wanted to know what I was talking about. So I got a task team together with police, doctors and lawyers.
“We sat down and asked why babies are being raped. We worked for six weeks and we couldn’t find the answer. But what we discovered was a lot of grey areas where kids were not being helped and the reporting process was one of it. One of the police officers, the head of the Child Protection Unit then, said to me, ‘Don’t you want to start a charity that supports us and the victims?’
“I said I was too busy, giving talks and I already had my charity. He phoned me every week for weeks. He was Andre Neethling, who is now with the Hawks.
“One day I went to Durban and I spoke at a charity called Open Door – a place of safety for women and children. I stayed in a guesthouse and when I left, the owner, who I didn’t meet because I was in and out of the guesthouse, ran after me and said she was a prayer warrior and had a message for me. I went ‘ja… OK’.
“So I sat on the plane and I opened the note she had given me. It said, ‘you will lead many who are in the same situation you are in’. I thought ‘Hostages? Must I now become a negotiator or what?’
“Then it just dawned on me: it’s the children. The reality is we work with children who are mostly being raped by people they know and I just realised one day that we were under the threat of being raped. It happened in our camp and I was terrified. These kids are being raped by people who are supposed to protect them. Can you imagine? They are hostages.
“Incidentally, when I got off the plane at about 4pm that Sunday, the phone rang and it was Andre Neethling. He said, ‘Monique …’ and I said ‘Andre, that’s it. I’m starting this.’ “And that’s how we started.” Matla A Bana creates child-friendly facilities at police stations that make the experience less daunting for survivors of child rapes to give statements to police. It helps 20 000 children a year.
The organisation also provides comfort packs for police investigators to give to children to help break the ice. Packs are filled with toys, snacks, sweets, underwear, toiletries and whatever it takes to make the traumatic experience a little bit more bearable.
“We’ve given support where the police couldn’t give support.
“The problem is that children are not reliable witnesses. In this country they need to testify to get the conviction. The ages are becoming younger and younger.
“It’s what Thabo Mbeki said: 16 days of no violence shouldn’t be 16 days, it should be the whole year.
“We can never do enough. We saw a big sponsor yesterday who asked why we were doing so many projects. We said we can only do comfort packs and we won’t have enough money to help enough children. So we know each and every project we have is making an impact.
“We started looking at the bigger picture because otherwise you’ll get depressed. We think of that one child who is going to get that one pack whose life is going to change.
“We had a police officer in Vredenburg who wrote to us to say thank you for the packs because this kid arrived and didn’t want to speak. When they handed her the pack she started speaking. The perpetrator was somebody’s boyfriend, someone who knew the child and he was on the run already. Had she spoken three hours later, he would’ve been gone. So it actually helped the case. We try and focus on the one child – one at a time.”
Mbeki has a special place in Monique’s heart. But she is concerned that the energy from the government to lobby for her and Callie’s release was no longer evident.
“Obviously we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. With Yolande and Pierre Korkie it was that Gift of the Givers that did most of the negotiations. The sad thing is that our government has contacts in places and so I think they could’ve done much more. We interacted with Yolande quite a lot.
“My general feeling was that the government’s focus was not there as much as it was with us. I must say we had amazing people who worked on the case. Because it was a first of its kind, they didn’t know what to do. So they actually did more.
“Thabo Mbeki wrote to us. It was faxed at two in the morning from his house. And his wife wrote to us and it was quite heartwarming. He was one of the only presidents of the hostages who actually wrote a letter and really cared. That was good for our country. It really brought people together – not by our doing, but it showed the good side of the people of this country.”
These days Monique and Callie are circumspect about their travelling adventures. But their experience hasn’t stopped them from seeing the world.
“I don’t think it was as bad in those days. When we wrote in our book about Bin Laden it was 2000 and no one knew he existed. After 2001, the whole world changed. Before that being a tourist was being pickpocketed in Barcelona or Paris or something like that.
“Now people are much more clued up. We will think twice about where we go because we have a child. But it’s not stopped us from travelling. We won’t go into countries where there is instability or war. I wouldn’t go to Mali for instance.
“But I think the wonderful thing about human nature and spirit is that we won’t be held hostage by those people. I believe that if it’s your time, it’s your time. It doesn’t matter if you lock yourself up in the house and stay there forever.”
Monique is driven by the personal motto that defines everything she does. It reads: “Never, never, never give up.”
“A lot of people who have gone through something terrible, help other people because they have an understanding. I don’t know how it feels when a child is being raped and what they experience. But it gives you perspective and you have much more empathy and sympathy.
“For a lot of people it’s been a healing process, to be out there and be able to say, ‘Thank you. Thank you that I got a second chance’.”