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
Hamdi Ulukaya and Chobani have made the decision to feed 250,000 victims of the Somali famine. Their compassion speaks for itself, and is a shining example of how the business community can have an enormous positive impact on the world.
A little goes a long way in Somalia: $5 will feed a person there for about two weeks.
Many, including the Canadian and U.S. governments, try to provide family support while also maintaining a hard line about further fuelling terrorism and hostage-taking through ransom payments ... Still, try telling that to a mother, or a father, or a husband or wife caught in the powerless agony of standing by.
Because travel has always been such a vital part of myself and so essential to who I am, I have made the decision to continue to put myself back out into the world. And that's not an easy decision to make.
My faith in human decency was sorely tested at times during my captivity; however, after my release, I am humbly reminded that mankind is inherently good by the tremendous efforts and support of fellow Canadians.
I would like to especially acknowledge my home community of Calgary, and the people of central Alberta who made my dream of freedom a reality.
It was a slow understanding that my kidnappers really are a product of their environment.
I must try desperately to absorb all information I can about the Middle East. I want to excel. I want to speak articulately about the politics of the Middle East and its religion.
Accompanied by an Australian photographer named Nigel Brennan, I'd gone to Somalia to work as a freelance journalist, on a trip that was meant to last only ten days.
Friendships that don't fit my life anymore have faded away, and new ones have come in.
Getting on a plane is hard for me, but I do it, because travel is vital to me.
We all waited on an afterlife. Only I planned to be alive for mine.
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.