Phoebe Flanigan / OPB
Five days of solitary confinement, sleeping on mats in a cement wall cell — Stacey Addison, a Hillsboro veterinarian, didn't expect that this was going to be a part of her world travel expedition. Addison quit her job to see how far her love of travel would take her. The plan was to travel for several years until her money ran out, and then to come back home. One day changed the direction of her entire trip. Addison joined host David Miller on Think Out Loud to share her experiences during her journey.
When her visa was about to expire, Addison said she was traveling from Indonesia to East Timor to renew her visa. But on a routine border crossing, Addison ended up in a car with a fellow passenger carrying a package full of methamphetamine she said she knew nothing about. Minutes later they were followed by a man on a motorcycle. He stopped them and started yelling in Indonesian before he drove them to the police station.
"Initially, I thought everything would be OK," Addison said, "but I was wrong."
Addison spent the day waiting for the prosecutor to come talk to her — he never came. Her passport was withheld to make sure she remained in the country during the trial. Following her release, Addison petitioned to get it back and was told that she world receive it in a few days. Those few days turned into her getting put into prison.
"From the beginning, people were telling me, 'It's just formality ... It's a bureaucratic thing,'" Addison said. "And multiple people had told me that. But then it turned out it wasn't true."
After spending the first five days in solitary confinement, Addison was introduced to life inside a prison cell.
"You can only go out to get the food," Addison said. "Basically they bring the food in like a big giant pot and you line up to get food. You go in and you're not allowed to speak to anyone. They are not allowed to speak to you ... and you just sit there in the cell."
Addison says she soon stopped believing that she would be released soon.
On Christmas day, Addison got notification that a judge signed an order to release her. She spent the following two months living with ex-East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta.
"I didn't know (the release) was coming," Addison said. "We had filed a petition weeks before, which I didn't have a lot of hope for because I already had petition denied in the meantime while I was in prison."
In total, Addison spent two months in jail in East Timor, and a total of six months in the country waiting to get her passport back so she could return home. Addison said she plans on traveling again in the future, despite her experience of being imprisoned in East Timor.
"I would like to say it wouldn't affect me, but I'm sure it will," Addison said. "One of the things that this taught me is that these kinds of experiences aren't as rare as we would like to believe and there is a lot of things that can go really, really wrong."