For a Mira Mesa Mother, a Phone Call Brought Christmas and Answered Prayers

For four months, Betty Hampson of Mira Mesa said, she has felt sick at her stomach. But Thursday morning, she felt ecstasy, hearing news that for her meant an early Christmas and answered prayers.

It was her youngest of three sons, Randy, on the phone from Iraq, where he had been held captive since Sept. 4.

“Mom! Mom! Did you hear? I’m coming home! I don’t know when, but they told us we’ll be leaving!”

And, his phone time limited, the 32-year-old electrical engineer asked his mother for one quick favor: Please call his employer so that money can be sent to him in London, where he wants to stop and see his girlfriend before coming home.

“I promise I’ll be home by Dec. 26,” he pledged.

With that, Betty Hampson’s burden lifted and her phone began ringing off the hook with calls of relief and joy from friends, she said.

“I had been praying every day. After a while, that’s all you would do. Pray. And now they’ve been answered,” said the 64-year-old woman. “He said he’ll be home the day after Christmas, but, for me, Christmas came today.”

Randy had been calling home somewhat frequently recently, she said. The first time was to wish her a happy birthday just before her Nov. 3 birthday. That was the first she had heard from her son since the Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. Randy had spent four years in Kuwait as a contract employee for a company doing work for private businesses there.

It was with that phone call, she said, that she learned that Randy had been captured Sept. 4 by Iraqis, when he tried to sneak across the border into Jordan with others.

After that, the Iraqis allowed him and others to call home--but presumably they monitored the calls and often would cut them off in mid-sentence, Betty Hampson said.

She was able to learn, though, that her son apparently was one of five men living in a five-bedroom house not far from an oil refinery, about 25 miles from Baghdad. Randy presumably was part of Saddam Hussein’s human shield.

The men ate three meals a day--often chicken and rice--and played volleyball and ran laps for their daily exercise. There were no indications of mistreatment, she said. Other hostages who had been freed in recent weeks had called her, Hampson said, to share news about Randy, and they, too, said he was in good health and good spirits.

The phone calls from her son were more frequent in the past month. “And I’ve heard more from him in the last week than I did in three years,” Hampson said Thursday.

She said she feels confident that Hussein will not back out of his promise to release Randy and the other captives.

“I think he (Hussein) is wising up a little bit. I think he knows he has to do something.”