The Reasons Whistleblowers Stay Silent (Part 1)

When I first saw my new island home of Borneo, Indonesia in 2015, it was on fire.

The single-engine Kodiak airplane that carried our family of five, our bags, and our hollering cat descended toward the city of Palangkaraya. Flames burned red on the surrounding landscape and wispy smoke spiraled up toward our wings.

By 2015, we’d served 10 years with Mission Aviation Fellowship on a different island. My husband, Brad, had flown wheel planes, landing on dirt strips on sides of mountains. A year earlier, he’d survived a plane crash. Though we lived every day with gratitude for second chances, I was still recovering emotionally from the trauma of almost losing him. However, when MAF asked us to begin a new adventure and move to this small float plane base to support isolated communities living on the banks of Borneo rivers, we said yes.

But we’d arrived just in time for what would be one of the Indonesia’s worst fire and smoky seasons. I felt uneasy but said nothing. I’d long learned that MAF missionaries needed to be strong, flexible, and trust our leaders.

Within a couple weeks, the uncontrollable fires were closing in on our city. Smoke was so thick we often couldn’t see the house across the street. I would sit on the couch in the living room trying to do reading and math lessons with my kids while ash sprinkled down around us inside the house. Due to low visibility, our MAF planes couldn’t fly to pick up critical medevac calls or villagers hoping to evacuate.

Side-by-side photos of the same bridge in our town of Palangkaraya to show normal conditions versus the 2015 smoky season.

The fire season is bad in that part of Indonesia most years during the dry season. But in 2015, a complex combination of forces including financially lucrative but controversial palm oil plantations and their clearing-by-burning methods,¹ combined with a particularly dry El Nino cycle made them spread fast.² An area the size of Vermont was soon destroyed.³

Borneo’s thick peat moss on fire created noxious fumes. Our city posted air quality levels on the town’s traffic circle. By late September, the Air Pollutant Standard Index number climbed to above 1,500, five times what is considered hazardous to health.⁴

The Guardian would call it the worst man-made environmental disaster since BP’s oil spill.⁵

A month after we arrived, our three expat MAF families decided to evacuate. We bought tickets on an Indonesian commercial flight to another island. But the smoke was so thick that the airliner couldn’t take off. Hour after hour, we waited in the airport, trying to entertain our kids and ignore our mounting anxiety. A question weighed on me that I, trying to be a brave, flexible, positive missionary, didn’t voice. What if it was too late to leave?

Finally, after six hours of waiting, the pilot decided it was safe enough to fly. The evening was finally dark enough for the crew to see the runway’s lights through the smoke, guiding its path to take off. On takeoff, the smoke blocked our view below of our Indonesian friends and neighbors. Most couldn’t afford to leave their jobs, shops, or farms and planned to wait things out.

My kids walking out to our flight out of Palangkaraya, the photo blurry from smoke.

We realized later that we’d caught one of the last few flights out of Palangkaraya. Those who tried to leave later by motorcycle or car risked crashing since they could barely see the winding roads.

When we landed on a different Indonesian island further from the fires, we breathed in the cleaner air, relieved for our young kids’ lungs. But my survivor guilt was stifling. I prayed daily and fervently for rain. But I also quietly wondered, had we done the right thing by leaving our community behind?

Months later, a torrential rainy season finally extinguished most of the fires. We arrived home to see Palangkaraya’s blue skies for the first time.

Brad flying an MAF amphibious Kodiak in Palangkaraya, Borneo.

I tried to put the trauma—and my unspoken questions about how to both speak up for my family’s needs while also serving my community—behind me.

But soon we’d walk through a different kind of trauma that forced me to choose between silence and voice.

The internal battle between voice and silence

You didn’t go looking for this. You were living your normal life, but then you saw something. Or maybe you experienced something traumatic. You were an employee or a church volunteer or a missionary and now, suddenly, you’re a victim.

It feels stressful to tell someone, especially your boss. But you don’t want this happening to anyone else and you know your boss doesn’t want that either. So, you report this, trusting them to know what to do.

Healthy organizations with trained staff respond well to reports of possible wrongdoing. But if your organization isn’t healthy, they may go to great lengths to actively silence whistleblowers. Attorney and advocate Melissa Hogan has written an important substack just this week on the specific silencing strategies organizations use.

Yet research shows whistleblowers usually attempt to report at least two to three times.⁶ It’s a journey, not a one-time choice, motivated by care for others in harm’s way. And each step along the way, they also face both external pushback and internal wrestling. They question themselves. Is what happened really abuse or am I making a big deal about it? Is it safe to tell this person? How do I deal with retaliation? Will speaking up make a difference?

Sometimes whistleblowers say something. Other times, they stay silent. But underlying your efforts is a longing that at the end of all this, everyone can return to healthy, safe, normal life.

We stay silent out of misplaced shame

In the two years following our evacuation, struggle was our new normal. Our family endured several more traumas—the near-death of our 3-year-old son, the death of an Indonesian co-worker in Brad’s arms, and witnessing domestic violence, to name just a few.

Soon life felt fragile all the time. Anyone could die at any moment.

I’m grateful to my Indonesian friends for showing me how to hold onto God in the midst of suffering. But I had started to see some problems with foreign missionary work, in general, that exposed a deep fault line in my Christian faith. Were we risking our family’s lives and health for a toxic colonial endeavor? That question led to many more. Soon I held the pieces of a fractured faith with no idea how to put it all back together.

During the day, I numbly went through the motions. Feed the family. Homeschool the kids. Try to keep everyone around me alive. At night in bed, I wrestled with dark thoughts until I fell asleep to nightmares.

A friend suggested I may be struggling with PTSD. But what could I do about it? I couldn’t find any trauma counselors in my Borneo town. Zoom calls across borders with licensed counselors wasn’t really a known thing yet. Singapore was the closest place for trauma help. But how could I possibly travel to another country when I had three homeschooled young kids and a husband who needed to keep flying?

Finally, I found some in-person help. A couple of American pastors had begun regularly coming to Indonesia to speak at MAF’s annual family conference and for other visits. Our MAF team also had entered into a covenant with them. They mentored our MAF leaders and provided spiritual discernment for our team’s quandaries, including prophetic prayer times with staff. To hold up our side of the covenant, the pastors strongly encouraged that we, the missionaries, personally donate to their ministry, even though MAF had already provided for some of their expenses.

The pastor were compelling, charismatic teachers and good listeners. So, my husband and I met with them together for prayer. Brad confided in them first, trying to untangle confusing and ongoing unresolved struggles we had with a particular MAF leader in this high-stakes, isolating work. And then because Brad needed to leave to take care of the children, I stayed to meet with them alone. Ashamed but desperate for help, I told them I’d lost the ability to believe in God.

The pastors calmly looked at each other, then both shared words they said were from God. We believe they wanted to help. But what they said was false and harmful. And the boundaries they crossed with me then and in the days to come only worsened the fracturing of my faith.

I confided in a friend from the United States about what happened and she named some concerning dynamics with the pastors’ methods. Then she urged Brad and I to report the matter to our boss.

Deeply ashamed and confused, I wanted to pretend it never happened. But I thought of female teammates who’d been through their own trauma—miscarriages, kids’ sicknesses, and their husbands’ scary aviation incidents. What if they sought help from these pastors and experienced harm instead?

So, Brad and I reported it to our boss, who was getting ready to leave that position. Then with his blessing, we told our MAF’s member care manager. She affirmed that what happened was concerning. But then she told us we did the right thing by telling her directly and not informing the whole team since these kinds of things can “divide” teams.

Dividing my beloved team was the last thing I wanted. So, we kept what happened from our team, tried to heal, and waited, leaving the matter in our leaders’ hands.

We stay silent to obey our leaders

But a year passed with no changes made and no investigation done. I saw no accountability and didn’t feel safe under the spiritual authority of the pastors.

One day, when our team requested feedback about the conference and the pastors’ teaching in a group email, I wrote back. I didn’t go into any specifics of my experience. But I carefully raised questions about whether our covenant had healthy safeguards and accountability structures.

Our new manager, who was close with the pastors, responded with an email to our team urging unity and focus on Christ. Also, while he initially said he was glad people felt safe to talk about difficult matters as a team, he said any further concerns should go directly to him.

Near the ending of his email, he wrote, “The enemy is prowling about looking for an opportunity to destabilize the bride of Christ.”

Meanwhile, as base manager of Palangkaraya’s float plane base, Brad felt the responsibility to report aviation-related concerns to this same manager. And Brad explained the burden that this manager’s decision to raise ticket prices placed on underresourced farming communities. Though email correspondence and recorded Zoom meetings show Brad was deferential and respectful, our relationship with this new manager was deteriorating. Before long, the manager started delaying—and delaying and delaying—much-needed piloting help. For months, Brad was the only MAF pilot for hundreds of miles, despite multiple Brad’s requests for more staffing.

Our manager added no safeguards regarding the covenant with the pastors, who were also his mentors. Brad and I requested help from a regional manager—our boss’s boss. After multiple requests, that regional manager finally launched his own internal investigation of sorts, though he never finished it. The pastors suddenly resigned from their roles.

In response, our direct manager blamed me for the pastors’ exit, saying my previous email to the team asking for safeguards had “brought harm” to the pastors, to the team, and to his ability to lead. Our boss also said he planned to share his negative views of me at an upcoming meeting on a different island where most of our team lived. And no, he said, I wouldn’t be allowed to share my side of the story.

Then our regional manager said that to be allowed to continue to serve there, we would have to apologize to our direct manager.

Their words were crushing. A wise friend who’d been advising us had warned us that MAF may require us to apologize for our whistleblowing efforts and advised against it for its inappropriateness. However, I was worried our manager would turn the team against me. The team had become a surrogate family in the midst of much trauma. I pleaded for them to understand why I spoke up.

“I have walked with some of these people for 13 years, a long time, 13 years with this team that I've invested in, that I have volunteered with, that I have gone where MAF has said to go and done what MAF has said to do,” I said in the recorded Zoom meeting. “And so, if you're thinking that I'm not caring for the team in this, I so care for the team in this.”

Brad told me later he knew in that moment he had to choose between submitting to his boss and advocating for his wife (and likely losing his job).

Brad chose me.

“Ethics were crossed and Rebecca was harmed,” Brad told our manager in the recorded Zoom meeting. “(P)art of being a leader is you're hurt when hard things happen. . . . It's not about you. This is about Rebecca. And I understand that you're hurt and I don't mean to disregard that. But it sounds like you're disregarding Rebecca.”

After that call—the week of Christmas 2018—we reported possible whistleblower retaliation to the manager of member care. We hoped she’d follow MAF’s whistleblower protection protocol as laid out in our staff handbook. I begged her 10 times for HR advocacy in our disintegrating relationship with our manager. But she said that wasn’t the right thing to do, urging us not to report retaliation “for the sake of the Gospel.”

In February, our regional manager emailed us to invite us to a meeting. Brad was at MAF’s Idaho headquarters for a month-long training visit, so he could meet with this manager in person. I could join by Zoom.

The topic? Our boss wanted to discuss the “many challenges being faced in Palangka Raya.”

On that day, I waited for the Zoom call to connect, dread knotting in my stomach.

In the past, out of worry that my shameful story would cause division on my team, I hadn’t told them what had happened with the pastors. And due to obedience to our boss, I didn’t tell them what was really unfolding with our managers.

The next reason for staying silent was just as much of a trap. I’ll share that common trap for whistleblowers in Part 2.

Correction: I made a change to show that MAF paid for some but not all of the pastors’ expenses.

1. Adam Voiland, “Seeing Through the Smoky Pall: Observations from a Grim Indonesian Fire Season,” NASA Earth Observatory, December 2015.

2. Robert D. Field, et al., “Indonesia fire activity and smoke pollution in 2015 show persistent nonlinear sensitivity to El Nino-induced drought,” The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), December 2015.

3. Ryan B. Edwards, et al., “Causes of Indonesia’s forest fires,” World Development, March 2020.

4. Jenito, Sapariah Saturi, “In Haze-choked Palangkaraya, Air Quality Five Times ‘Hazardous’ Levels,” in Mongabay, Sept. 25, 2015.

5. Irhash Ahmady and Sam Cossar-Gilbert, “Setting a Country Alight: Indonesia’s Devastating Forest Fires are Man-made,” The Guardian, Nov. 7, 2015.

6. Wim Vandekerckhove, Arron Phillips, “Whistleblowing as a Protracted Process: A Study of UK Whistleblower Journeys,” Journal of Business Ethics, 2017.