A House in the Sky (49 page)

The first person I spotted was my mother, waiting for me in the sunshine on the curb. She looked a little thin but beautiful. I was struck by how beautiful she was, in fact. It was as if time had folded in half, putting us back together as if nothing had ever happened. When she
embraced me, we both wept hard. I rested my head in the crook of her neck. She rubbed my shoulders with one hand and kept the other pressed firmly against the back of my head. It felt like shelter. It felt like home.

She said the same thing over and over. “You made it. You made it. You made it.”

At the hospital, Nigel and I were given rooms in a private wing, where we stayed for a week. His family—his mother and sister—had come to be with him. My father, too, flew to Nairobi, along with my old friend and traveling companion Kelly Barker, whose hair I had cut on the lakefront dock in Guatemala all those years earlier. Kelly, it turned out, had been a huge source of strength and a confidante for my mom while I was in captivity, driving from Calgary to visit, bringing her meals. After AKE was hired, Kelly had become part of the official “crisis management team,” joining weekly Skype calls with John Chase and our families to discuss the case.

In my hospital room, I was tended by nurses, doctors, and a female psychologist who specialized in trauma and had been flown in from Canada. I was treated for dehydration and malnourishment, put on an IV, and given a battery of tests. A dentist examined my broken and abscessed teeth. One of the first things I requested was to have my hair cut short, ridding myself of the inches acquired in captivity.

I’d spent so many months fantasizing about food, imagining the day when I could choose what to eat, and then eat until I was full. And now it had arrived: The nurses brought me a menu before each meal. The first few days, I wanted everything all at once. Even as the doctors told me to take it easy, they didn’t try to stop me from indulging, recognizing that I needed in that moment to exercise this most visceral form of freedom. I ordered chicken, pasta, vegetables, french fries, fruit, cake, and pie with ice cream. My heart boiled over with desire, but my body wasn’t ready for any of it. My stomach cramped viciously after eating. I couldn’t keep much down.

One afternoon, Kelly showed up, bearing a bag of food she’d bought in a fancy Nairobi supermarket—an extravaganza of gourmet cheeses and Cadbury chocolate. I’d always been an insatiable cheese-and-chocolate
eater. She’d teased me about it as we traveled together through so many humid, rice-eating countries, where such rich foods were scarce. Now, in the hospital room, we both laughed at the memories. But within moments, I was in tears. I knew that eating any of what she’d brought would only make me sick.

The frustration I felt echoed something larger I was only just beginning to understand. I was caught in a lag time: I was free, but I wasn’t yet well.

That first week was something of a blur, not unlike the gradual waking from a nightmare. From the cloud of a soft bed, I’d open my eyes in the morning and feel a rush of disbelief. The pillow under my head, my mother sleeping on the couch nearby, a hairbrush set on the table, the vases full of flowers sent by well-wishers, the stretch of morning sky outside my window. All of it seemed illusory, capable of vanishing. Nigel and I huddled with our respective families, both of us just starting to really consider and process what we’d been through.

Slowly, I learned more about the work that had brought about our release—the stress and sacrifice and round-the-clock effort put in by Nigel’s friends and family in Australia and mine at home in Canada, not to mention that of investigators, negotiators, and consular employees. The total cost of our freedom, including the bill from AKE, amounted to just over $1 million, shared equally by our two families. Old friends, distant relatives, and total strangers had stepped up to help. My dad and Perry had remortgaged their house. Restaurant-business friends in Calgary had held fund-raisers on our behalf. Robert Draper, the
National Geographic
writer, had flown to Canada to speak at one of them. People I’d never met on two continents had donated to our ransom fund, many in amounts of ten and twenty dollars, several contributing tens of thousands. Learning of it, I was humbled.

Early on, Nigel and I were given some surprising, happy news: After months spent believing that our captors had killed Abdi and the other two Somali men who’d been kidnapped with us, we learned that all three men were alive. In mid-January, roughly five months after
we’d been captured, they’d been blindfolded in the middle of the night and driven into the heart of Mogadishu, where they were set free, unharmed, in a deserted marketplace.

I didn’t learn what happened to Mahad and Marwali, but it turned out that Abdi, the cameraman, had relocated to Nairobi, having been granted refugee status after his ordeal in captivity. He’d felt unsafe returning to life as usual in Mogadishu. He couldn’t afford to bring his wife and children with him, so they had remained behind. After I was released from the hospital, I spent another couple of weeks recuperating in Nairobi, staying with my parents at the home of the Canadian ambassador. One morning, I was able to arrange a meeting with Abdi at a local hotel.

He was the same as I remembered him—thin, handsome, soft-spoken. We hugged for a long time. He was trying to find freelance work as a videographer in Nairobi, but so far, wasn’t having much luck. He showed me photos of his children at home, saying he missed them. Life as a refugee in a city that already teemed with refugees was difficult. Our kidnapping had left him rattled, unable to sleep at night, tormented by memories of being hungry and beaten and kept in the dark. Abdi had questions about my experience as a hostage. We compared notes on what we’d observed about the boys and the leaders. He and Marwali and Mahad had suffered greatly over five months. He couldn’t fathom that Nigel and I had endured another ten. He gently asked if I’d been raped, and when I confirmed it, he began to cry.

Abdi called me his sister. I called him my brother. We were united, I could see, by what we’d both been through but also what we still yearned for. We wanted the same thing—not just to be free, but to
feel
free.

*

Nigel and I said our final goodbye at the Canadian ambassador’s house in Nairobi late in 2009. We’d been free for two weeks. He’d left the hospital and stayed on at a hotel with his family, building up strength to make the trip home. We were pale and thin and haunted, but at
least on the outside, we were beginning, slowly, to resemble normal people again.

I always assumed that we’d be friends forever, that we’d simultaneously move on while continuing to share—as we had over so many months—the minute intimacies of our inner lives. I figured that Nigel and I would always, in some way, be standing at our respective windows, swapping stories and finding ways to get each other through. On that first night of freedom in the hotel in Mogadishu, we made earnest promises to make visits and stay close. We wondered what it would be like to step into our former lives, full of people who couldn’t possibly understand what we’d experienced. We said “I love you” again and again.

As soon as we reached Nairobi, though, our circumstances quickly began to tug us apart. There was lingering tension between our families over the stress and financial burdens they’d been forced to share. Nigel and I would go back to our respective countries and sink into our individual efforts to make sense of what had happened and to start new lives. I think it’s safe to say that neither of us knew how challenging it would be.

For the first couple of months, we tried to Skype and e-mail, but our conversations were disjointed, sometimes tense. We are not the same people we were when we were taken. We’ve found it hard to connect, and this has been painful. Nigel wrote a book recounting his experience in Somalia and resumed his work as a photographer. I will always wish him well and be thankful for his strength and friendship during those fifteen months.

Returning to Canada just before Christmas, I was reunited with my brothers and Perry, with my grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends. I felt like a foreigner in my own life, half-caught in the world I’d left, sorrowful for the trouble I’d caused at home, yet surrounded again by people I loved, I also felt a pure and absolute joy.

F
or a while, I kept careful track of my freedom. I counted each hour, and day, and week that separated me from the 460 days I spent as a hostage. It seemed like a natural thing to do, to work some internal abacus, sliding and clicking the days until one part felt like the past and the greater sum became the present. Being free is something I will never take for granted. I’m grateful for even the smallest pleasures—a piece of fruit, a walk in the woods, the chance to hug my mom. I wake up every day feeling thankful for all that people have given me, from working to get me and Nigel out of Somalia to helping me adjust to life after captivity.

I have tried to make good on the promises I made to myself. I finally got the chance to attend university, completing a six-month diploma course in international development leadership at the Coady International Institute at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia in 2010. My course of study was chosen in service to another vow, one made from the depths of the Dark House—that somehow I’d find a way to honor the woman who charged into the mosque to help me after Nigel and I tried to escape, who literally threw her body over mine and fought until I was dragged out of her arms.

When I think about Somalia, I think about her. I can picture her face, her head scarf ripped away, her eyes wet with tears. I never knew her name. I don’t know whether she lived or died.

It was for her, really, that six months after my return to Canada, I founded a nonprofit organization called the Global Enrichment Foundation, to help support education in Somalia. I’d spent so much time in captivity wondering about the boys who guarded me, specifically, whether they’d have been different—less entrenched in religious extremism and war—if they’d had more opportunities to go to school, and maybe more meaningfully, if they’d been raised in homes where their mothers and sisters had been able to attend school. The Global Enrichment Foundation partners with other organizations to help bring about change in Somalia—from providing food aid to supporting girls’ basketball teams and funding full, four-year scholarships to thirty-six bright, ambitious Somali women attending university. Several of the GEF’s projects, including funding a primary school and the construction of a community library, are happening inside Dr. Hawa Abdi’s camp, the same place Nigel and I had set off to visit on the day we were kidnapped.

*

About a year after Nigel and I were released, I received a phone call from Ottawa. A National Security officer informed me that in a shed somewhere outside of Mogadishu, a notebook had been discovered. It had the UNICEF insignia on its cover, though the image had been blacked out with a marker. Inside were pages of cramped writing. Somehow, through a network I’ll never know or understand, the notebook had been passed on to the Canadian authorities. I was given a scanned set of those pages. My whole body shook when I first dared to look at them. Even today, I see that writing and feel the stream of desperation running beneath the words.

There are days when my memories of Somalia loom and oppress, and other days when they take up less space in my mind. I suspect it will always be this way. In the nearly four years since I was freed, I’ve learned a lot about trauma—about what it does to both the brain
and the body. One morning when I was attending a lecture at school in Nova Scotia, a classmate sitting next to me ate a banana, leaving the peel on the table near my notebook. The smell ambushed me, triggering instant panic, unlocking a memory I’d kept out of reach in some far corner of my mind—of a day in the Dark House when I discovered a rotten banana peel on my floor and was so hungry and desperate that I ate it. Suddenly, all the old sensations were back—pain, hunger, terror—and I ran from the classroom, locking myself in a bathroom stall, feeling like I couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t, wondering whether my freedom was only a dream.

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 continue to be afraid of the dark, to have nightmares that jolt me awake at night. In confined spaces, such as elevators, I sometimes feel like I can’t breathe. Often when a man gets close to me, my mind screams,
Run!
My body too carries the memories. My ankles sometimes ache as if they were shackled; my shoulder sockets get sore as if my arms were still tied.

Dealing with the aftermath of trauma is not something anybody can do alone. I went through a specialized treatment program to help me cope with symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I’ve also worked regularly with therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, acupuncturists, nutritionists, and meditation experts. All have helped me in different ways. I’ve also found comfort in talking with other women who’ve survived rape. Yet even so, there are times when I feel deeply alone with what happened to me, mismatched to my surroundings—to regular everyday life. There is still plenty I long for—for education, new adventures, and opportunities to be of service to others, and also for love and a life that someday includes children.

I remain focused on healing. I’ve sought out quiet places to reflect, continuing to travel, to find sustenance, as I always did, out in the world—in the mountains of India, in the jungles of South America, and in Africa, where my work for the foundation sometimes takes me.

*

It’s hard, of course, to feel comfortable with the fact that my captors profited from our kidnapping. Since my release, I’ve followed stories of other hostages—in Somalia, in Mali, in Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan and elsewhere—and felt anxiety and empathy for everyone involved. Some governments quietly pay ransoms. Others strike diplomatic deals or send in armed commandos. Many, including the Canadian and U.S. governments, try to provide family support while also maintaining a hard line about further fueling terrorism and hostage-taking through ransom payments. As one U.S. State Department official put it in an interview with the
New York Times Magazine,
“If you’re out there feeding the bears, the bears are going to keep coming into the camp.”