Amanda Lindhout was 27 when she and a male friend were captured in Somalia by Muslim extremists who then demanded $2 million in ransom.
Lindhout, a novice writer / photographer from Canada, and Nigel Brennan, an Australian photographer, were held hostage under horrid conditions for 460 days. Soldiers raped, starved and tortured Lindhout, who dreamed of an imaginary “house in the sky” to maintain her sanity.
With co-writer Sara Corbett, Lindhout has written a compelling account of their captivity with insight into the dreams and lives of the boy soldiers as young as 14 who kidnapped them.
Lindhout grew up in a dysfunctional home where her stepfather repeatedly beat her mother. As an escape, she began reading National Geographic and dreamed of touring the world. She skipped college and had scant knowledge of writing and photography. She felt drawn to hot spots, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, where the risks of kidnapping and violence were great.
After an on-again, off-again relationship with Brennan, she invited him to accompany her to Somalia, where she hoped to find interesting stories to photograph and report, sometimes for her hometown newspaper.
The toughest parts of the book involve the couple’s brutal captivity. “The boys,” as she calls her captors, threatened to behead her if ransom was not paid. After being gang-raped one day, she “bled not for hours or days but for weeks afterward.”
Once, she and Brennan escaped through a tiny window and fled to a nearby mosque, where they quickly were recaptured. The treatment turned more ferocious. Lindhout was kicked in the mouth and ribs, and bound tightly in a way that caused excruciating pain.
Beautiful prose propels the story forward. After a captor told Lindhout she had only hours to live, she observed: “Fear, sustained over a number of hours, feels like something you can drown in. I’d been paddling in it all day.”
She and Brennan converted to Islam to curry favor with their captors.
“This was simply a chess move. We were doing what it took to survive.”
To stave off despair, Lindhout thought of things she was grateful for. She was thankful one day when a captor set her food on the floor next to her mattress instead of throwing it at her.
The captors repeatedly telephoned Lindhout’s parents in Canada, demanding ransom. Her parents pleaded they had no money, but the boys did not believe them, convinced that “all Westerners swam in rivers of cash.”
The author studied the Koran and spent hours talking to her captors about its teachings and mandates. One captor dreamed of becoming a suicide bomber, and each drew strength from the Koran’s promise of eternal paradise. Although Lindhout does not judge Islam, her compelling story is a sober reminder of the evils sometimes carried out in the name of religion.
Lindhout did not enter Somalia blind to the risks. At least 20 aid workers had been killed in one year, and some international organizations had withdrawn from the country. Kidnappings for ransom, she says, are more common than is generally realized. Some journalists carry kidnapping insurance, knowing their governments rarely pay ransom to free kidnapped citizens.
Eventually, the families of the two captives came up with a total of $1million to win their release. Lindhout says little about where her family got the money.
Despite her suffering, Lindhout felt tenderness toward “the boys” who had captured her.
“For my own good, I strive toward forgiveness and compassion above all the other feelings – anger, hatred, confusion, self-pity – that surface in me,” she writes. “Forgiving is not an easy thing to do. More than anything else, though, it’s what has helped me move forward with my life.”
Back home, Lindhout founded the Global Enrichment Foundation, a nonprofit that now works in Kenya and Somalia. Readers likely will be touched by the author’s commitment to helping people in an area where she was subjected to extreme cruelty that easily could have killed her.
A House in the Sky, by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett Butler; Scribner, 373 pp., $27
Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford, Conn., and a former editorial writer for The Hartford Courant. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and can be reached at billwaw@comcast.net.