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
Christmas was the one time of year when my brothers surfaced at home, when my parents and grandparents congregated to eat my mother's roast turkey.
Contemplating Christmas when you are isolated and far from home brings its own unique pain.
I don't only long for the thrill of being in the middle of a war, I must understand it; I must make other people understand.
Forgiving is not an easy thing to do.
I've realized that the world is, in essence, full of banana peels - loaded with things that may unwittingly trip an internal wire in my mind, opening a floodgate of fears without warning.
I think it's the human spirit inside of all of us that has an enormous capacity to survive.
Every day I have many choices to make about who I want to be.
Somalia is an important story in the world, and it needed to be told.
I made a vow to myself while I was a hostage that if I were lucky enough to live and to get out of Somalia, I would do something meaningful with my life - and specifically something that would be meaningful in the country where I'd lost my freedom.
Sometimes, you have to make the choice to forgive 10 times a day when you have these pockets of anger come up. That's a lot of work, but to me it's worthwhile.
I have a general sense of excitement about the future, and I don't know what that looks like yet. But it will be whatever I make it.
When you see a 14-year-old boy who has never known what peace looks like for a day in his life, there's part of you as a human being that feels some degree, you can say, compassion for the fact that these boys have known war, famine, violence and death from the day they were born.
The greatest gift you have been given is the gift of your imagination - what do you dream of wanting to do?
Somalia is very dangerous, and no one knows that better than I.