OTTAWA – The idea was conceived in captivity. It blossomed in a series of windowless rooms and was forged by the torture, fear and shackles that bound Amanda Lindhout for 15 months in southern Somalia.

Her captors, Islamic fundamentalists affiliated with the Hizbul-Islam insurgent group, took away her freedom, her safety and threatened to take her life if millions of dollars in ransom money were not paid by her family and the family of Australian photojournalist Nigel Brennan.

“Their belief system allowed them to abuse me in very specific ways … and it’s reflective of their view of women,” she said in an interview.

“The same men who are placing all these outrageous restrictions on women’s freedoms in southern Somalia – that type of mentality – that’s what I had to deal with in captivity.”

But the dozen teenaged boys who held her hostage also unwittingly gave her the spark that is now fuelling the 28-year-old Albertan, even as she tries to recover from her ordeal.

“I used to wonder how they would have been different if they had had the opportunity to have an education, to understand something of a broader world view and learn something about tolerance,” she said.

Six months after the Lindhout and Brennan families paid a reported $600,000 ransom for their release, the freelance journalist has become an advocate and aid worker.

She is targeting the very nation that left her traumatized and her family in financial ruin with a scholarship that aims to send 100 Somali women to university annually for the next four years.

“This has blown away our minds because for someone who went through what she went through to come back and say, ‘I want to do something to alleviate some of the suffering of the women there,’ it’s very very touching,” said Ahmed Hussen, president of the Canadian Somali Congress and co-director of Lindhout’s Global Enrichment Fund.

“It’s a very real and tangible project because it’s going to educate these people in their own country.”

What Lindhout went through remains shrouded in a sort of cloak, one she is unwilling to pull back for the moment.

She and Brennan were abducted along with a local driver, fixer and translator on Aug. 23, 2008, two days after arriving in Mogadishu. They were on their way to interview refugees at a camp.

They were shuttled between up to a dozen safehouses while in captivity, but were poorly fed, beaten, tortured and locked in separate rooms, rarely seeing one another. All the while the threat of death hung over their heads as the kidnappers tried to negotiate a ransom payment for their release.

Brennan, who has also said little since they were released, said that Lindhout was “severely beaten” and they both endured mental and physical torture.

“Being pistol whipped is sort of torture,” he said. “Being completely stripped of everything and then locked in a room, no one to speak to, is a form of torture really."

Still, they managed somehow to escape after five months, before being recaptured.

“I won’t go into detail about it but there was a woman that day who risked her life in an attempt to save mine and that woman has made a very profound and lasting impression on me,” she said. “I’ll never forget her bravery. It was really remarkable.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Lindhout is aware of the other reports that emerged from local media and private security firms of her ordeal – that she was forced to convert to Islam, forced to marry one of her captors and gave birth to a child last July – but isn’t willing to discuss the details.

She will only say that through her own suffering, she feels a kinship with many Somali women, particularly those of in the country’s south where the militia rule resembles that of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

And that makes her life now, spent mostly with family and friends in Sylvan Lake, Alberta, all the more sweet.

“It’s difficult to put into words what freedom feels like. You only know what freedom feels like if you know what it feels like to not be free,” she said.

But Lindhout’s freedom hasn’t translated into free time. Her schedule is quickly filling up with requests for her to speak at universities, cultural groups, universities and companies.

There’s also work she’s still undergoing with doctors and psychologists. And a letter arrived in the mail a few weeks ago accepting her into a post-graduate development program at St. Francis Xavier University in August.

Last week she was in New York City where she had an invitation to meet the Dalai Lama. It is, she admits, moving, touching and confounding all at the same time.

“Lots of weird stuff happens when you get kidnapped.”

She’s also got money to raise, $400,000 over the next four years to meet the challenge she has set out for the Somali women’s scholarship. She is determined to succeed, despite seeing the difficulty raising such an amount has done to her family’s finances.

And so Lindhout speaks.

“I understand that because of my story people are willing to listen, and so … if I can use that platform to raise awareness to the conditions that women are enduring in Somalia then I think that’s a great thing and that’s not difficult for me to do.”