Amanda Lindhout lives to tell the tragic stories of poverty and civil war in the most dangerous places in the world.

Now her own story of peril is making headlines around the world.

On Saturday, the 27-year-old Red Deer-area freelance reporter and an Australian colleague were abducted at gunpoint in Somalia. It’s believed they were captured after interviewing people displaced by extreme violence in the capital of Mogadishu.

Family in Red Deer and Sylvan Lake are waiting anxiously to hear word on their loved one’s safety.

“We haven’t heard anything,” said Lindhout’s grandfather John Lindhout Sr. of Red Deer on Sunday. “It’s kind of hard to take. It doesn’t happen every day . . . she is a nice, outgoing person.”

Lindhout approached the Red Deer Advocate earlier this year to do freelance work after accepting a job with a Middle East television news channel in Iraq.

Her weekly columns began appearing in March. Her most recent one was e-mailed to the Advocate on Friday, this time from Mogadishu, Somalia.

In this column, which appears in today’s Advocate on Page A4, Lindhout describes Mogadishu as a city of contrasts. She writes of sweeping beaches and sapphire blue sea views — and empty streets and crumbling whitewashed buildings.

“This city is called ‘the most dangerous place in the world’ for a reason,” Lindhout writes.

“Twenty years of civil war has turned the country into a lawless frontier,” she said. “Mogadishu districts are controlled by warlords or the African Union peacekeeping troops sent to the country to counter them. Nowhere is safe.”

Lindhout had already survived several close calls in Iraq, so she was familiar with the risks. During a trip to Baghdad’s Sadr City district, a sprawling slum of 2.5 million poverty-stricken residents, Lindhout and others she was travelling with came under intense gunfire.

“Terrified, we ducked and covered our heads,” Lindhout wrote. “Breathless, I braced my body, waiting to be hit. I could hear the bullets pounding into the walls on either side of the car.”

Lindhout said she knew what fierce battles were, having been embedded with military troops in Afghanistan last year.

But she said she had never experienced anything like this attack before, being alone and vulnerable in a “soft-skinned” car and with no protection.

Iraqis also warned her of the possibility of being kidnapped for money, simply because she was a foreigner. One driver cautioned her daily not to speak at any Iraqi checkpoints out of fear she’d become a target.

“We told her lots of times to stay away from those countries,” Lindhout Sr. said. “It seems she likes it, though.”

Advocate news editor John Stewart called Lindhout an intelligent, caring and adventurous professional who was aware of the dangers of the regions she frequented.

“The places she’s been and the things she has done have been exceptionally brave, but obviously very dangerous as well.”

Stewart said Lindhout was aware that her audience was keenly interested in her world perspective and she worked bravely to bring them that perspective.

Her columns often ended with a pointed question of what the rest of the world was doing to help millions of suffering people.

During her recent trip to “the most densely populated slum of the world,” found in Nairobi, Kenya, Lindhout wrote: “The answers to the disturbing, frightful questions that creep into the mind of anyone witnessing this kind of incomprehensible abject poverty are obvious.”

She was recently putting together freelance reports for a French television network and was hoping to sell them to Canadian broadcasters.

Lindhout and Australian Nigel Brennan, along with a Somali photojournalist and a driver, had travelled to an area about 20 km from Mogadishu.

Journalists and humanitarian workers are frequently abducted for ransom in Somalia, one of the world’s poorest and most violent countries.

Foreign Affairs Canada is keeping in touch with Lindhout’s parents, including Jon Lindhout of Sylvan Lake and Lorinda Stewart of British Columbia. Lindhout Sr. said his granddaughter has a younger brother and stepbrother.

Department spokeswoman Eugénie Cormier-Lassonde said on Sunday that consular officials are working with Somali authorities to confirm the kidnapping reports.

Reached in Singapore, Red Deer MP Bob Mills said he would do whatever he could to help the family, including speaking with Foreign Affairs Minister David Emerson so that Lindhout’s disappearance would be given “the highest priority.”

Mills was flying home to Red Deer on the weekend.

Terry Argiroudis of Montreal has set up a website, http://freeamandalindhout.blogspot.com

“I don’t know her, but I feel terrible about it,” said Argiroudis in an e-mail. “I started the group to attract awareness to people in Canada and around us.”

Contact Laura Tester at ltester@reddeeradvocate.com