[Adrienne] Let's start with the ending, it's a good one.
After being held hostage in the Sahara for 450 days,
Canadian Édith Blais is okay, not because someone saved her, but because she made a run for it.
When I was alone for so many months, I was like, oh my god
I couldn't see no light at all and so anything is possible.
[Adrienne] And this is you, the sands of time?
[Blais] Yeah exactly, I felt trapped in time.
[Adrienne] Trapped, terrified. She's a talented artist, writer, passionate traveler who needed
her wits, driving across Burkina Faso in a tiny blue car with her Italian friend Luca Tacchetto.
Did your family ever give you the gears about taking this trip?
Well they were scared, but it wasn't the first time they were scared. Yeah,
my guardian angel was tired I think.
[Adrienne] Her guardian angel surely dozed off in December of 2018
as they drove along a potholed empty road.
Close to the border when the sun was starting to get down, there was this six men, yeah,
fully wrapped with their AKs blocking the street and we, I mean at that point,
you just realize like oh my God, I remember just looking at Luca. We
had this eye contact and like, oh we might die like this may be the end.
[Adrienne] An ambush, Édith and Luca driven into the desert on motorcycles for 20 days at gunpoint.
So much blowing sand she had to take out her contact lenses.
Her captors wouldn't let her take her glasses.
So that's a big decision when you take out your contacts.
Yeah you feel so vulnerable when you don't see.
[Adrienne] They were in the hands of Islamic militants, career kidnappers.
From that December until now, there have been more than 600 recorded kidnappings there.
Canadian Kirk Woodman would be found dead not far away,
just a few weeks later. Édith and Luca only understood what was right in front of them.
When we got to the desert, then we realized okay this is really big. At the beginning,
I was with Luca and there was a lot of drones so they were hiding us actually.
They were making little huts out of branches and dry herbs and it was really really small
so we were just laying down day and night, one beside the other and we couldn't even sit up.
[Adrienne] Three months like that, then they were separated. Édith drawing maps in her head, holding
onto images and timelines especially of the moment she's told she's going home. It's a trick,
she's moved to a rough desert camp and finds three women.
I told them, well they're supposed to bring me
to Canada and I was a little bit mixed up and I heard the car that brought me there
leave and the women were like, I don't think you're going to leave very soon.
[Adrienne] One by one, they told her they'd been held for two to three years.
I was going like I can't do another month, it's impossible and they've been there for
so many years. It hits you, you try to still hold on hope because I mean, you can't.
[Adrienne] You have to.
Yeah, you have to just to keep your head out of the water.
How did you make the time go by together, what did you do?
They had one needle so we would find threads from clothes or from the tent or
so we can talk and at one point and there was, the oldest one, she had a pen
and that's when I realized that it was like, oh my God if ever I could like just borrow it, I could
write poems and just leave this place for like an hour or two hours, just go
and so I asked her like, can I borrow your pen? And she, of course, please and we found
little cardboards from the tea and stuff like that so I would write poems each day.
[Adrienne] With the needle and those bits of thread, she made this bag,
crafted a little hope and peace on it. With that pen, the words flew, at first etched on
the scraps of boxes, now marked in print noting the chapters of her book the weight of sand.
[Blais] A hand dips into the light, a woman quenches her thirst
for life, a whole river's might flows through the brittle red desert.
Yeah I wrote that one on March 19, 2019. It was the 92nd day of captivity.
[Adrienne] The date she knows because the women
would recite it together every day for nearly five months, all scared,
hungry, getting weaker. Did you ever get an indication that someone was looking for you?
[Blais] They separated me from the women, then I was alone for six months
and somebody that came by motorcycle and he gave me this red envelope written Édith on top
and that was kind of a shock. There's three pictures and two letters inside for me
and the third picture was me and my father, we were arm wrestling.
[Adrienne] What did the presence of that picture change for you and for your captors?
[Blais] So I would show them and they would always point my father and say,
baba baba. That was really strange, it's like if, I don't know, I felt
as they see, they saw I was a human and I had a father like they were all fathers.
[Adrienne] Surviving meant seizing any opportunity, the biggest when she
was finally reunited with Luca after nearly a year apart. So you and Luca cook up this plan.
Well, I didn't think we, we have nothing to lose I think that's what happened.
We had to plan little things because they, when we went to sleep, we had to give them our shoes
so we couldn't escape very far without anything to protect our feet. So I sewed some
shoes with my carpet and then some cardboard and we kept the water from our showers
to be able to have some water to escape. It took a month to do all that.
A month? And so how did you pick the day?
So we were hoping like maybe three days after the full moon, we would have enough light
to be able to escape and see and life really helped us there because after the three days,
after the full moon, there was this big wind of sand in the night.
So what did that mean, what difference did that mean for you?
Because of wind all in the air so they couldn't see us and we had to go through these parts of
sand and usually they could find your footsteps, but the wind just erased everything.
[Adrienne] So they bolted in the homemade shoes, that handmade bag stuffed with as many cardboard
scraps of poetry as she could manage. All the worry, the furies, the dreams escaping with her.
[Blais] I did a little pouch that I put my poems in and that's it.
[Adrienne] You must have left some behind though?
Yeah I left with 52 and I probably rolled like 150.
We walked the whole night, 20 kilometers or something.
And we found this big road so we're like, oh maybe there is trucks going through there.
[Adrienne] Finally one slowed down, Luca ran for it, Édith followed.
So I asked Luca when I arrived like can we go up? He, I think so, he wasn't sure even
so we put her bag, look like, he looks fine so we got in, we closed the door and he left with us.
Yeah, that was crazy.
[Adrienne] They didn't speak the trucker's language, but he recognized fear.
By day's end, they were at a U.N. office then moved by helicopter to Bamako.
Suddenly, a meeting with the president, Canadian representatives, all of it astonishing
and the date, March 14, 2020, the world in a pandemic Édith and Luca knew nothing about.
[Blais] But everything is weird at that moment, I mean
you've been isolated for 15 months and everything was weird. There was so much media also,
but I was really happy just to be free and I was quarantined with my mother. She was really happy.
[Adrienne] It was a whirlwind of a day after an eternity of low rumbling, fear and isolation.
It's taken a while to speak the words out loud. She's learned two of the women she was with were
freed, the third died in the desert. Luca is home in Italy, they haven't seen each other since.
Do you ever dream about any of this now?
When I was writing the book, the whole time I was writing, I was doing nightmares
at night and once I stopped, I was finished the book, it all stopped. It's very rare now that
I dream that I'm captive and yeah that's pretty much it like I let go, I think.
[Adrienne] And those men who stole her freedom,
she's met with counterterrorism officials, looked at photos but has gone no further.
I let go of everything, I try to let go of things that won't change like
negative things that are not going to change if I keep it. I just let them go.