The PARTNERS Family Services Community Gala carried a theme of solidarity and awareness for violence against women, with large turnouts for Walk a Mile in Her Shoes, and a student rally and gala that both featured a speech by former hostage Amanda Lindhout.
“(The day) was awesome ... I’m trying to think of the best ways to describe it,” said Rachel Trann, executive director of PARTNERS. “It probably couldn’t have gone any better. We were overwhelmed by the support, the amount of volunteers, the people who came out to enjoy the day.”
In 2008, Lindhout, an aspiring war correspondent, and photojournalist Nigel Brennan went to Somalia to write human interest stories in a country that had less competition from journalists than places like Baghdad. They weren’t there for very long when they were kidnapped by a group mostly comprised of Somali teenagers and held captive for 15 months until their families could raise the ransom. Following an escape attempt, Lindhout was brutalized and tortured at the hands of her captors. Now, Lindhout speaks about the power of forgiveness and overcoming her anger.
“Her message was amazing,” Trann said. “I was sitting in the arena when she was speaking to almost 1,000 students and I looked around at their faces and everyone leaned in, completely silent, listening to her message of being able to overcome and forgive and choosing to live a life of happiness. The same thing happened at the gala.”
She spoke to about 1,000 students from around the region at the Elgar Petersen Arena and then later at the gala in Jubilee Hall.
Lindhout started her speech by detailing her troubled childhood in Sylvan Lake, Alta. Her family was poor and she and her brother would search through dumpsters for bottles to take for recycling. With this money, she would buy old issues of National Geographic and dream about visiting those places. Upon graduation, she moved to Calgary, where she worked waitress jobs for long enough to fund different trips.
“I hope that kids listening to me (at the student rally) can relate to that aspiration to be out in the world when you come from a small community and they can see from my example I’m somebody who’s done it,” Lindhout said. “Certainly I crossed a lot of lines and pushed a lot of boundaries that maybe they won’t do, but I hope that through listening to me they’re reminded that the world is a large and beautiful place and that there are a lot of exciting and beautiful things to see.”
Some places Lindhout visited weren’t typical tourist destinations, like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria.
“What I learned (from travelling) is they’re not usually the places you see on TV,” she said. “People have a lot more in common than differences.”
On one of the trips she met Nigel Brennan, an Australian photojournalist who ignited her ambition to become a freelance war correspondent. Her book details her difficulty in selling stories and photos while in Iraq and Afghanistan, so she decided to go to Somalia because of the lack of competition with other journalists. It was here they were kidnapped.
At first, Lindhout and Brennan were mostly left alone and even started to build a connection to their kidnappers, who enjoyed talking about their lives and practicing their English. Their kidnappers talked about how they had seen their families killed and had few options for their lives. One confided that he didn’t like being a soldier and wanted to be a student. In her book, Lindhout talks about another boy who just wanted to finish the job and go home to his girlfriend. It was through this connection that Lindhout came to sympathize with her kidnappers.
”They had been brought up in this culture of war,” Lindhout said.
Following a failed escape attempt, things got a lot worse for Lindhout, who was chained in a pitch black room and brutalized and tortured almost every day.
”I could only lie on my back, in the dark, for 24 hours a day,” she said. “I lost the sky. I lost my own name. Laughter, light ... I couldn’t understand how this life, this fate, could have been mine.”
She described feeling something building inside her to the point where she knew she would snap. Eventually, the “snap” came while being hurt by one of the kidnappers and she suddenly dissociated from herself and felt calm. It was at this moment she chose to forgive and empathize with her kidnappers in order to get herself through the ordeal.
”I understood that person hurting me was suffering himself,” she said. ”Nurturing compassion is the greatest power in captivity. I could still choose my response.”
She acknowledged that choosing forgiveness was always hard, but that “It was always the greatest gift I could give myself.”
Eventually, the two families raised enough for the ransom and Lindhout and Brennan were free, though freedom was not without its costs – Lindhout had missing teeth and hair, as well as fungus on her face and lingering problems due to starvation.
Lindhout’s book about the experience, A House in the Sky, was released last year.
“Taking the time that I needed to think through what I wanted to share with the world I found to be really healing,” she said. “Having the book come out into the world is a whole other thing.”
The book talks about Brennan lying about a girlfriend and flirting with Lindhout, as well as his depression while in captivity, though Lindhout wasn’t too worried about his reaction to his portrayal.
“I think when you write a memoir, you’re always worried about the reactions of the people who are included in that,” she said. “With Nigel, I tried to be very delicate and honest about what we went through. It’s difficult when you’re writing a memoir and you’re relating difficult things like what Nigel and I went through, but I believe that he understands my motivation behind writing the book, so I don’t really feel bad about it.”
However, Brennan and Lindhout no longer speak, which Lindhout attributes to the two of them coming out of captivity different people. Brennan also wrote a book about his experience, called The Price of Life, which was released in 2011.
During and after her kidnapping, Lindhout received criticism from journalists about her perceived recklessness and naivete. Lindhout addresses this in her speech and admits she made unwise decisions.
“You heard me speaking today. Do I not say all the same things myself? With the whole me being a controversial figure, that’s kind of in the past, because I’m not a journalist, I don’t identify myself as a journalist now, and I think that anybody who takes time to read my book or listen to me speak, I’m the first to say I’d do things differently,” she said. “I was young; I made mistakes, as we all do when we’re young.”
She adds that many journalists start off doing what she did, such as Anderson Cooper or Dan Rather.
“It worked out differently for (them),” she said. “I don’t defend my position, but have tried to live and grow from it.”
Her experience in Somalia has shaped who she is now – she founded the Global Enrichment Foundation to help people in Somalia by creating sports teams and scholarships, which people thought was weird at first.
“This work has really become my life. It’s how I transfer my experience into something good,” she said.
At the gala, an audience member asked what she would be doing if she hadn’t been kidnapped, and she replied that she had no idea, but believed in destiny to a certain extent, and wouldn’t take back what happened to her.
She said her experience has followed her in ways she didn’t expect: she was taking classes in Nova Scotia when she received a Facebook message from one of her kidnappers congratulating her on her work in Somalia, which she admitted was “upsetting.” However, she doesn’t feel like her experience has come to define her life too much.
“I haven’t hit that point with it yet,” she said. “I’m happy to keep doing it as long as audiences are getting something out of it.”
