After being in captivity for so long, I can't begin to describe how wonderful it feels to be home in Canada.

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

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

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

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.

The road to recovery will not always be easy, but I will take it one day at a time, focusing on the moments I've dreamed about for so long.

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.