AMANDA LINDHOUT
16
SPRING 2018
A LESSON IN RESILIENCY:
SURVIVING
the Unimaginable
A STORY ON AMANDA LINDHOUT
AMANDA’S STORY begins in Red Deer,
Alberta, a small city halfway between
Calgary and Edmonton. Born into a poor
family, Amanda long dreamt of escaping
her bleak surroundings to travel the
world, inspired by the fascinating
photographs she saw in the stash of
National Geographic magazines she kept
by her bedside. Determined to become a
world traveler, she saved the income she
earned waitressing in nearby Calgary,
and in 2007, she set out to test her mettle
in the war-torn countries of Afghanistan
and Iraq. A year and some few
assignments later, she found herself in
Somalia where she met up with an
Australian photographer and friend, Nigel
Brennan. From there, her life descended
into an abyss of torture and terror.
THE KIDNAPPING
On August 23, 2008, shortly after setting
out to cover a story about a refugee camp
in Mogadishu, Amanda, Nigel, and the
rest of their party were abducted by a
group of Somali gunmen. Their captors
would hold the two photojournalists
captive for the next 460 days. Their
release was contingent on a $1 million
ransom demand, which neither of their
families could afford to pay. The
Canadian government, which maintains a
strict policy of not succumbing to ransom
demands in an effort to help ensure the
safety of Canadian travellers, was unable
to help the families pay or fundraise for
the ransom.
When Amanda found herself separated
from Nigel just eight weeks into her
ordeal, she realized immediately that her
situation worsened considerably. While a
male prisoner was often able to manage a
sense of respect from his abductors, there
was no such luck for a female. Amanda’s
captors mercilessly tormented her with
complete impunity. At one point, she
reports, she was tortured for forty-eight
hours straight. She was alone, desperately
afraid, and physically and emotionally
gutted.
What followed Amanda’s kidnapping was
almost unimaginable in its horror. After
the duo attempted an ill-fated escape five
months into their capture, things became
unspeakably worse. As described in A
House in the Sky, Amanda’s own account
of her ordeal that she co-authored with
journalist Sara Corbett, her
circumstances became much more dire
after the failed escape. From that point
on, she was held alone in a small, dark
shed, with tiny portions of food and
water, shackled in chains and beaten
repeatedly.
Yet if you were to meet 35-year-old
Canadian Amanda Lindhout today, she’d
probably strike you as a Kate Middleton
look-alike, with a radiant smile and
flowing chestnut hair. Never would it
enter your mind that this woman had
survived extreme torture in Somalia
– and thrived despite tremendous odds.
How did she do it? How does someone
face the depths of inhumanity and,
according to all accounts, manage to still
emit positivity upon reentering the
civilized world?
A FAMILY SUFFERS
As a victim of this misogynistic culture,
Amanda had no hope of reasoning or
negotiating with her captors. Not only did
they strip her down to a bare existence
mentally and physically, but they preyed
on her mother, too, by calling her at all
hours to demand ransom, and turning her
entire family’s lives upside down. While
her family occasionally received tightly
scripted calls from Amanda, they knew
little about her day-to-day existence,
which they realized sat squarely in the
hands of a group of irrational gunmen.
“My mother wasn’t allowed to ask any
questions during these calls, and I wasn’t
allowed to speak freely”, she says.
Believing that everyone in Canada is
wealthy, the kidnappers had no qualms
about beating Amanda to get her to stick