Off Script by Marci Ien

Author:Marci Ien
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

She Was Comfortable, I Was Comfortable

The first time I spoke with journalist Amanda Lindhout was via satellite, shortly after her release following fifteen months of captivity in Somalia, where she had been kidnapped by Islamist insurgents in August 2008 while attempting to visit an internally displaced persons camp to conduct interviews alongside Australian photojournalist Nigel Brennan. She was very fragile, having endured several months of brutal treatment, including torture and serial rape.

We met in person four years later, upon the release of her memoir, A House in the Sky, which she co-wrote with journalist Sara Corbett. I sat her down and said, “Listen, we are not going to be discussing anything you don’t want to discuss. If you’re uncomfortable with something, we just move on. You tell your story as you see fit.” I believe I was holding her hand during the countdown before the cameras came up. I’d told her, “Don’t worry about the cameras around you. You’re just talking to me.”

We weren’t friends, not at that time, not yet. But she had already impressed me in so many ways. When Amanda had gone to Somalia, she was a relatively inexperienced foreign correspondent trying to gain experience and build a career. She’d briefly reported from Iraq and Afghanistan, but her only professional affiliation while in Somalia was with the Red Deer Advocate in Alberta. Before heading to Kabul, she’d worked as a cocktail waitress. She’d had no formal training. When the news of her abduction broke, many journalists, some of my colleagues among them, were more critical than sympathetic, saying, “Why was she there? She knew it was dangerous.” And, it was implied, and sometimes said outright, she wasn’t even the real thing, a proper journalist. She hadn’t studied or paid her dues.

It wasn’t my instinct to blame Amanda for her own misfortune or to question her motives. After all, a hankering for adventure and a certain recklessness aren’t uncommon among foreign correspondents. And besides, it’s not as if experienced journalists are immune from being targeted by insurgents and kidnappers or incapable of mistakes or bad luck. NBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel has written in his own memoir, A Fist in the Hornet’s Nest, of the “bravado, gumption and good luck” that saw him through his early years in the business, including an early foray into Cairo with no knowledge of Arabic, no local contacts, no journalistic affiliation, “and no real clue what I was getting myself into.” Had Amanda been more reckless than he had been? Or was such reckless bravado less appealing, less admirable, in an attractive former cocktail waitress than in a rugged male college graduate?

There’s a real pettiness sometimes in journalism circles. I didn’t see Amanda as some trifling young woman who got herself into a situation she shouldn’t have been in. I didn’t think, You know Somalia’s the most dangerous place on earth. Why in God’s name would you go there? And then the Canadian government’s supposed to get you out? No. I admired Amanda tremendously.

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