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www.insideHALTON.com | OAKVILLE BEAVER | Friday, March 11, 2016 | 12 Anger a huge global issue: Lindhout continued from p.3 talked about watching family members massacred in front of them. We heard stories from some they had watched their siblings die of hunger." "It was pretty obvious these young people involved in our kidnaping had been shaped by this culture of war. They were literally born into it." She said for them, things like going to school or getting a job are just a dream, making them easy recruits for extremist groups and criminal gangs. After a few months, the kidnappers separated Lindhout and Brennan. As days passed, she said she would walk in a circle in her room, imagining the wonderful places she had travelled to keep herself sane. Despite being separated, Lindhout and Brennan could still communicate by whispering through the walls and planned their escape. A window in the washroom they used was bricked up, but they chipped away at it until there was a hole big enough to get through. They escaped but heard a gunshot from inside the mosque as she left. To this day, Lindhout has no idea what happened to that woman. "This is still really hard for me to talk about," said Lindhout, choking back tears. "For the 10 months I still had left in captivity after that, I thought about her every single day. I thought about her courage, I thought about her compassion and it really gave me strength when I needed it the most because everything that followed that failed escape attempt was punishment." Lindhout and Brennan were again separated with Lindhout chained to the ground in a pitch-black room. Lindhout didn't share what her captors did to her during those 10 months, stating only she experienced hunger and starvation, sexual abuse and extraordinary physical pain and suffering. She said her most challenging times were when her faith in human decency felt completely lost. Things changed one day when she was being abused by an 18-year-old named Abdullah, a man whom Lindhout described as being among the cruellest of her kidnappers. Lindhout said during this abuse, she had a moment where she saw what was happening from outside her body. "In this disassociated state, I really began to understand for the rst time who this person hurting me was. What I thought about during those disassociated moments was Abdullah's life story, the one he had shared with me before things got so bad. I pictured him as a boy, hungry and orphaned, hiding behind a truck as his neighbours were massacred. "For that split second, with absolute clarity, I understood something, which was this person who was creating so much suffering for me was also suffering himself. It was his own anger, depression and rage at his life experiences that allowed him to abuse another. I am not calling him innocent, not at all, but I do believe he was driven by the need to make someone suffer more than he was and then his layers of pain covered his conscience." Lindhout said these thoughts of compassion helped her by allowing her to let go of the anger, rage and hate that were consuming her. "Chained to the oor, I had control over very little, but I still had control over how I responded to everything. I still had my values, my morals." On Nov. 25, 2009 Lindhout and Brennan were released after their families raised the ransom. The three Somali colleagues captured with them had been released earlier that year. Lindhout said she struggled for some time with what had happened to her, but just four months after her release, she founded the Global Enrichment Foundation (GEF), a non-pro t organization dedicated to igniting leadership in Somalia through educational and communitybased empowerment programs. In 2011, she returned to Somalia, where she led famine-relief efforts and raised millions of dollars to aid and support more than 175,000 people. Lindhout said this path is far better than an alternate course of action. "The hatred and anger we carry around inside of ourselves, we all have it there, but that is our own internal enemy and it is only when you can learn to let go of it that you will have real peace and freedom in your life. "When our minds get clouded by negative emotions, like hate and anger, that is when we lose control, that's when anything can happen.... It sounds simplistic to say, but it is true that anger is one of the biggest problems facing our planet today." Amanda Lindhout the noise alerted their captors. Lindhout and Brennan ran to a nearby mosque for help. It was full, but the kidnappers chased them inside, ring their weapons. Lindhout said a woman in a Niqab tried to intervene, pleading with the kidnappers and grabbing Lindhout as she was dragged away. 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