Missionary sister says God told her to remain 'peacefully patient' during captivity in Burkina Faso

Around Christmas in 2021, Marianite Sr. Suellen Tennyson, then supervising her congregation's medical clinic in Yalgo, Burkina Faso, in West Africa, received a text message from her nephew, James Downing, who lives in Richland Hills, Texas, near Fort Worth.

"Aunt Sue, I have a picture for you," Downing typed, drawing out the suspense.

A few seconds later, Downing uploaded a black-and-white picture, the kind that needs to be pressed proudly to the refrigerator door with a magnet.

"It was a picture of a sonogram," Tennyson said, recalling her unbridled joy.

It didn't take long for Tennyson to decipher what the sonogram meant: Her nephew's wife, Kim, who had suffered through years of infertility, whose first child was stillborn and who had subsequently adopted three children, was expecting a baby in her mid-40s.

"It was a little miracle," Tennyson recalled thinking in her post-Christmas excitement.

When Tennyson was abducted four months later in April 2022 from her Burkina Faso convent — bound and gagged in the middle of the night and ridden through the forest on the back of a motorcycle — she was beginning a five-month journey into the inscrutable hands of God.

Tennyson didn't know much about her first band of kidnappers, who grabbed her from her bed, barefoot and without glasses or prescription medicine, and told her to hang on to the back of the motorcycle.

But a short time later, she was turned over to a rival Muslim group. During the subsequent five months of isolation, she slept outside under a handcrafted tent-like structure with branches and leaves for a roof and a cloth that could be adjusted to keep the sun out of her eyes.

Other than her small group of caretakers, who fed her a daily regimen of spaghetti and sardines, she never saw another human being.

But something happened early on in her captivity that allowed Tennyson to continue clinging to hope: The Muslim man who now was her lead captor took a look at her feet, bruised and bloodied from being dashed against the rocks and branches, and stooped down to wash them.

"When that Muslim man was washing my feet, I knew he didn't understand the symbolism of it, but it was God speaking to me through him," Tennyson told the Clarion Herald, newspaper of the Archdiocese of New Orleans.

There were no books to read, and certainly no Bible. Her captor found a few scraps of paper and a pen on which Tennyson could keep track of the days and the weeks and the months.

She prayed virtually every waking moment, reciting from memory the prayers of the Mass and making a spiritual Communion. And, she continued to think about the sonogram and about Kim.

"I was super anxious because Kim had had so much trouble getting pregnant and because of what happened with her first pregnancy," Tennyson said. "I was praying, praying, praying."

When for some still unknown reason on Aug. 29, 2022, the Muslim group handed over Tennyson to U.S. authorities, she remembers the first question she asked as she was being transported to freedom at an American Air Force base in Niger: Did Kim have her baby?

"That was one of the things I needed to find out right away," Tennyson said. "Honestly, I'm not sure who told me, but it could have been the FBI because they were the ones who were keeping in touch with the family. They told me, 'Yes, Kim had the baby!' "

Iris Patricia Downing was born July 27, nearly one month to the day before Tennyson's release.