Bookmark this New York Times excerpt from a the book Twelve Minutes of Freedom in 460 Days of Captivity, and read it on your lunch break. The scene that Amanda Lindhout sets of being held captive in Somalia is, at turns, horrifying and engrossingly mundane:
It wasn’t until later that day, when a new man arrived, introducing himself as Adam, that it became clear they were after more money than we had in our pockets. Adam looked to be in his mid-20s, thin and serene. He wore an orange-striped polo shirt and Ben Franklin eyeglasses. He asked for the phone numbers for our families and told us that he no longer believed we were spies. “Allah,” he said, “has put it into my heart to ask for a ransom.”
… Was there some way out? There had to be. Nigel told me he had been studying the window in the bathroom we shared and thought we could climb through it. I, too, had looked at that window plenty of times, seeing no option there. About eight feet off the bathroom floor, recessed far back in the thick wall up near the ceiling, was a ledge maybe two feet deep, almost like an alcove. But what was at the end of it hardly counted as a window. It was rather a screen made of decorative bricks with a few gaps, serving as ventilation holes for the bathroom. The bricks were cemented together. And then, as if that weren’t enough, laid horizontally in front of the bricks was a series of five metal bars anchored into the window frame.
“Are you crazy?” I said to Nigel. “It’s impossible. How would we get out?”
