Amanda Lindhout
Amanda Lindhout
Amanda Lindhout is a Canadian humanitarian, public speaker and journalist. On August 23, 2008, she and members of her entourage were kidnapped by Islamist insurgents in southern Somalia. She was released 15 months later on November 25, 2009, and has since embarked on a philanthropic career. In 2013, she released the New York Times bestseller A House in the Sky: A Memoir, in which she recounts her early life, travels as a young adult, and hostage experience. In 2014, the...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth12 June 1981
CountryCanada
Women in Somalia face almost unimaginable oppression.
I used my captors names every chance I had. It was intentional, a way of reminding them that I saw them, of pegging them, of making them see me in return.
Maintaining my dignity is so important for me.
A little goes a long way in Somalia: $5 will feed a person there for about two weeks.
I am so proud to be a Canadian.
I have watched lives change. I have seen women gain confidence.
Because that’s the thing about the exact moment when you get somewhere that has required effort: There’s a freeze-frame instant of total fulfillment, when every expectation has been met and the world is perfect.
I, too, was carrying around my own fate. All the things I couldn't know sat somewhere inside, embroidered into me-maybe not quite fixed to the point of inevitability but waiting, in any event, for a chance to unspool.
In my version of paradise, the air was always cold and the rivers ran with candy.
I think that I find a lot of my healing out in the world.
I know firsthand how critical support systems are.
I'm afraid of elevators, because they are an enclosed space, but I get in.
I went through an extremely trying ordeal, but I never forgot the world outside was a beautiful place.
It was a slow understanding that the lack of education in a country like Somalia creates these huge social problems.