Nigel Brennan

It's been a good 35 years.

Do I ethically feel it's okay for my parents to be paying this money so that the white guy gets to go home?

What is that money going to be used for?

I was, I guess, having these arguments with myself.

Which may sound strange, but it was this thing of like, well, is that fair that the white Western guy goes home because he has money and then that money gets used for buying weapons and then innocent people are being killed in Somalia with those weapons?

Like, is that fair?

It's not fair at all.

Again, that's why I was really grateful to have Amanda there because I started to even get angry with her because it was like, you were the one, this was your idea, right?

You know, not wanting to take accountability of getting on the plane myself, like she didn't drag me on the plane.

I walked on there, you know, quite freely, open will.

But it was just like, you were the one that suggested coming to Somalia.

This is your, like, not saying that to her, but this is in my thought process.

So I was sort of withdrawing from her and not really speaking to her.

And look, she gave me a fairly stern talk around the two week mark and just said, look, we actually need to work together because I'm struggling as well and I need your support and I think you need my support.

And probably from that point on, we sort of worked as this well sort of oiled peer support network between the two of us.

So we spent a lot of time in the room.

Like we're allowed to go out twice a day for 15 minutes and sit in the open air, which was sort of fairly daunting when guys are standing around pointing AK-47s at you.

So I think I'd actually just prefer to go back to my cell where there's a toilet and I basically got a little bit of privacy.

And we were never locked in rooms.

through that the whole ordeal like the doors were just shut um but even you know i guess with with complete boredom of nothing to do i created like a backgammon board so i used like i got a couple of panadol and carved dice and and obviously put numbers on them so that we could play and we used um