War dehumanizes everyone.

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.

With awareness come responsibility and choice.

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'm not afraid of IED's, bullets, mortars.

Women in Somalia face almost unimaginable oppression.

I used my captors names every chance I had. It was intentional, a way of reminding them that I saw them, of pegging them, of making them see me in return.

A little goes a long way in Somalia: $5 will feed a person there for about two weeks.

I swung from one place to the next, sometimes backward, sometimes forward, capitalizing on my own momentum, knowing that at some point my arms—or, more accurately, my quivering bank balance, accessed through foreign ATMs—would give out, and I’d fall to the ground.

In my version of paradise, the air was always cold and the rivers ran with candy.