SYLVAN LAKE, Alta. - An Alberta journalist who was held prisoner in Somalia is never going back there, but the scholarship program she has set up for girls in the poverty-stricken country could bring change.
Amanda Lindhout says 11 young Somali women have been selected to go to one of six different institutions in the country. She hopes she will be able to raise enough money to have 100 women studying in four years time.
Originally she and the Global Enrichment Foundation panel members had planned on picking 10 women as the first scholarship recipients, but she says there were too many good applicants.
"People are often surprised I'm doing this considering everything that happened to me in Somalia, but people often respond to that and understand through my story the need for attention to Somalia," said Lindhout, who will be speaking at a church in Sylvan Lake, Alta. on Sunday to fundraise for the scholarships.
Lindhout was snatched off the side of the road outside Mogadishu along with Australian photographer Nigel Brennan in August, 2008. The pair, who had been working in Somalia as freelance journalists, were freed last November after their families teamed up to hire a hostage negotiation group.
She said she came up with the idea for the scholarships during what she called "the darkest times" of her captivity. She said women have a challenging time in Somalia, particularly in the country's south where she was held.
"My captors would go out and watch these stonings of women," Lindhout explained, noting that militias gathered groups of young men to participate in the stonings, which were carried out against women accused of adultery.
"I felt that they felt they needed to talk about it. There was a veneer of religious righteousness, but they were also traumatized. They had just watched a woman lose her life. The oppression of women in Somalia affects everyone, not just women."
Lindhout said she was also moved by a Somali woman who risked her life to help her and Brennan when they briefly escaped at the five-month point of their captivity. She wouldn't provide details of what the woman did, other than that it happened at a mosque where they took refuge after they climbed out a bathroom window of a house they had been held in.
She said they'd gotten the window open by using nail clippers to chip away at the mortar surrounding it for several days. Unfortunately, word got back to their captors that they were in the mosque and they were caught in less than 20 minutes.
Lindhout said her organization advertised on Somali radio stations for applicants for the scholarships. Two of the successful applicants want to help the Somali environment. Another wants to be a youth counsellor to show young people there are alternatives to life as a soldier.
She said her fundraising effort has been greatly helped by the Canadian Somali community, which she said has moved her deeply.
"I will never be going back to Somalia," Lindhout said. "It's just not possible, but I will do whatever I can to help the Somali people wherever I am."
"The idea that I could do something to make Somalia a better place if I lived through [my captivity] was something that gave me the inspiration to make it through the really challenging times of captivity and I saw that education was the best way to start."
More information about the scholarships is available at globalenrichmentfoundation.com.
Source: Canadian Press
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