It was the answer to many prayers:
Former hostage Jill Carroll met with the staff of The Christian Science Monitor on Monday, visiting for the first time the newsroom of the paper that hired her a week after she was taken captive in Iraq.
The 28-year-old journalist had been working as a freelancer for the Boston-based newspaper when she was kidnapped in January from one of Baghdad’s most dangerous Sunni Arab neighborhoods by a group that called itself the Revenge Brigade. The newspaper added her to its staff during her 82-days in captivity. She was released Thursday and returned to the United States on Sunday.
David Cook, the Monitor’s Washington bureau chief, described Carroll’s 45-minute visit with her colleagues as “an emotional lovefest.”
The Monitor released a copy of the 6-minute video of the meeting and posted it on its Web site. The video shows her, with her relatives standing off to the side, delivering a composed but emotional “thank you” to her newsroom colleagues.
“I just want to say how much I’m overwhelmed by how wonderful the paper has been to my family,” Carroll said. “I got back from this ordeal and discovered, it’s like a humanitarian organization.”
Carroll has been in seclusion with her parents and twin sister since she arrived in Boston on Sunday.
Cook said Carroll is not yet ready to tell her story to the public.
We’re sure it’ll come out in the press…eventually book form and — most assuredly — be the subject of a movie. Because these days when someone is taken hostage in Iraq, the endings are not always as pleasant and the prayers aren’t always answered.
The CSM also ran this story detailing the reunion with her family (pictured above in a Monitor staff photo).
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.