Sister Dimaya

Year: 1999
Place: Tacloban City, Leyte, Philippines
My Age: 20-21

This entry is somewhat unique compared to the rest of the blog.  I say 1999 while I was 20 and 21, because that is when I knew Sister Dimaya.  She was the wife of my first mission president, Fred C. Dimaya.  She's also the person who performed the first three surgeries on my ingrown toenail.  (Hey, there's an idea for a future blog entry.)  The story I'm going to tell about her, however, happened in the '70s before I was even born.

I don't know when this picture was taken.  I just got it off of Google Image Search.

She was a great mission president's wife.  Very happy and outgoing, and instantly put us missionaries at ease. She could always make us laugh.  The first time she operated on my toe, during my first month in the Philippines, she had me soaking my foot beforehand while she went to gather what she needed.  A few minutes later, she came out of the kitchen holding a meat cleaver and asked, "Are you ready?"

LDS Living Magazine published an article about four inspirational modern LDS women back in 2009.  I just found out about it today, when one of my old mission buddies posted a link to it on Facebook.  One of the women was Sister Dimaya.  I had heard snippets of the story she told before, but it was always third or fourth hand from other missionaries who had heard it elsewhere.  I knew that she had been a medic for a guerilla army when she was young, but I had never heard it told in her own words before today.  Here's the story, quoted from LDS Living:

"I’ve been a member of the Church for almost twenty-seven years. I have nine children – seven are living, and I lost two in infancy.

I was raised in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. I grew up Catholic. I studied at an exclusive girls’ school and later transferred to a private high school. Afterward, I went to the University of Santo Tomas and studied nursing for three years. I never took it up as a profession because in 1972 I got involved with a movement that was fighting against the Marcos dictatorship. I became involved because my cousin, whom I was rooming with, was a leader of the MAKIBAKA. This was a woman’s organization that was the counterpart to the men’s organization opposing Marcos.

I recognized that there were social problems in my country. I saw poverty all around me every day. But I thought, Well, that’s life. There’s nothing you can do about it. But after reading my cousin’s literature, I realized that you can do something about it. So I decided to join my cousin in the movement.

My cousin was blacklisted by the government and had to leave school. Not long afterwards, following a major demonstration, I was blacklisted and jailed, too.

My father did not visit me in jail, nor did he bail me out for fear of associating with me. When I was released, the police followed me everywhere. My cousin contacted me and said the movement would pick me up and take me into the underground. I wound up in a safe house in Manila, and that’s where I met my husband.

We learned that we would both be sent to Angeles City, Pampanga, to staff a hospital that was being built by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). We worked with doctors in the operating room, learning first aid procedures, but at the same time we were providing support for the CPP and its military wing, the New People’s Army (NPA). Any of their people who were wounded in encounters with the military were sent to us.

After a while, my husband was sent to the mountains, where people were being shot. I was already pregnant with our first child and I stayed behind, running the hospital. What I didn’t know was that one of our patients had been caught by the government and tortured. He finally gave in to the pain and told where the hospital was located.

One afternoon I was alone in the hospital and I locked it up to take a nap. Somehow the troops broke in and I was awakened by a gun barrel poking me in the face. Ten men in army uniforms surrounded me.

“No sudden movements,” they told me. “Just stand up and turn around.” They were looking for one of our commanders and I told them, “He’s not here. Go ahead and look around, but there’s no one here but me.”

Often female prisoners were raped or even killed, but for some reason they didn’t touch me. But I still didn’t escape torture. I was beaten with the stock of an M16 rifle. They wanted me to tell them where my husband was.

I was taken to the military camp in Angeles, Camp Olivas, for tactical interrogation. They asked me questions, and if I didn’t give the answer they wanted to hear, they slapped me. I withheld my real name, so my parents never learned that I had been taken.

I finally had to tell the military that I was pregnant with my first baby. They sent me to a hospital to make sure that the beatings hadn’t damaged my baby. Luckily, everything was fine. When I got back from the hospital, they kept me with the other female prisoners.

After the birth of my first child, we lived in the prison for another year. I applied for amnesty on grounds that prison wasn’t a healthy place to raise an infant. After a series of conferences, the military agreed to grant me amnesty on the condition that I report in weekly. They wanted to make sure the child was well and I was no longer with the opposition. My husband heard through underground sources that I had been released.

Eventually we managed to set up a meeting. My husband promised to find a way we could all be together again in the underground. One day he sent word that I should pack my belongings and meet him at a certain time and place. I went there and waited, but he never came. I learned through friends that he had been taken prisoner and was being tortured. Even today, he still feels some pain as a result of his beatings in prison.

*

My husband was held prisoner for eight months. After he was freed, we went to Cebu City, where his family lived. It was about this time that we first became acquainted with the Church. My husband’s cousin was working for the LDS Church Educational System, and he was transferred to Cebu to help establish the seminary program there. He and his wife told us a little about the Church. Later, we met the missionaries. About a year and a half later, in 1975, we were both baptized. Eventually my husband and I served a mission in Tacloban City, in the Visayan Islands.

We found that the Church gave us opportunities to work to improve the social conditions in our country. One of the most important factors in changing the culture of poverty is the change that is made inside a person, and the Church showed us that if you have the desire to make that change, everything outside will change, too.

I taught seminary for eighteen years and LDS Institute for two years. That experience taught me so much. In fact, I’ve learned more through my experiences in the Church than I ever did from my experiences in the hills."