By JULIE CARLE
BG Independent News
Sam Goodwin rode a camel in Egypt, perfected a handstand at the equator in the African island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe, jumped off a 70-foot cliff in Malta, bathed an elephant in Thailand, and ran with the bulls in Spain.
Those were among the adventures he wrote about in a travel blog during his decade-long quest to visit all 193 countries across the globe.
Sam, the grandson of Bowling Green resident Elaine Goodwin and son of 1974 Bowling Green High School graduate Thomas A. “TAG” Goodwin, had one travel experience–his 181st country–that warranted a book rather than an entry in a travel blog.
The book, “Saving Sam,” details his May 2019 visit to Syria when he was “taken hostage and wrongfully accused of being an American spy,” he said during a recent telephone interview. And it wouldn’t be as impactful of a book without his family and friends’ miraculous effort to get him released.
“It’s an unforgettable story that includes a travel journey to every country in the world, celebrities, heads of state, high-stakes diplomacy,” he said. “On the other hand, it’s about what we learn through this experience that we believe can help others today.”
His harrowing and life-altering experience started just two hours after he arrived in Qamishli, Syria. “I was walking through a roundabout on the way to meet up with my guide, and all of a sudden this black pickup truck pulled up next to me, and two armed men jumped out of the backseat and instructed me to get inside,” he said. He had been on his phone talking to his mother Ann when the call ended.
He was taken to a prison and held in solitary confinement for 27 days, then moved to a more general population prison for a total of 63 days, before the exceptional circumstances of his release.
In the beginning
Throughout his ordeal, he relied on the skills, lessons and values he learned growing up in a large, Catholic family, where faith was foremost and sports provided other lifelong benefits.
The oldest of TAG and Ann’s five children, Sam has two younger sisters and two younger brothers. He spent the first 13 years of his life in the Perrysburg and Bowling Green area, attending St. Rose Catholic Church and School before moving to St. Louis.
“A lot of my childhood was around playing hockey,” he said, including at the BG Ice Arena, now the Slater Family Ice Arena. “I had a little bit of success with the sport and ended up getting a scholarship to play Division I hockey at Niagara University in New York.” The sport has stayed an important part of his life.
After college, he took his first professional job in Singapore with a tech start-up business and an NGO charity that was doing business around Southeast Asia. He intended to stay for three months but ended up staying for six years. It is also where the travel bug bit him.
“It was a fantastic opportunity and a great way to begin my career,” he said. “Throughout that time, I traveled and explored the region and beyond as much as possible.”
After about six years of weekend and holiday travel, always to different places, he realized he had traveled to about 120 countries. “I remember thinking, ‘I wonder how many countries there are?’” which “evolved into this goal of trying to travel to every country and the world,” he said.
Travel was always about learning and discovery, meeting people and building relationships and providing “the best education I’ve ever had,” he said. “It was never about checking boxes off a list.”
Once the goal was set to visit all 193 countries, Sam admitted the competitive athlete in him kicked in a bit. “I like to set goals and work toward achieving them. From that point on, the style of travel changed because the goal had temporarily changed.”
He was always diligent about doing his homework before traveling, especially when traveling to countries with tenuous situations. Syria was definitely in that category. He had met Grammy-award winning British singer Joss Stone, who had performed in Syria and shared some insights about safe travel in a specific part of the country. He followed her suggestions but with a very different outcome than she experienced.
Stand firm in faith
In the book, Sam describes, in vivid detail, the horrors of his time in prison. From solitary, dirty, unsanitary conditions to hearing the screams and torture of nearby prisoners, never certain if or when he would be next.
In the darkness of solitary confinement, he had difficulty grasping time and space. Once he figured out a system for keeping some semblance of time, etched into the prison wall like previous prisoners had done, his faith and resilience became his saving grace.
“The most challenging part for me was the uncertainty of the situation,” he said. Everything had been taken including his material possessions, communication and freedom.
“I was stunned and in disbelief about what had happened. My life had essentially spiraled out of control in the most terrifying of ways,” he said.
Sam found strength in perspectives of gratitude he developed from traveling to different corners of the world; in the mental toughness, critical thinking and resilience he developed as a competitive athlete; and the belief that he had a purpose in life and a driving desire to see family and friends again.
“All of those were important, but nothing was more important than my faith. Everything had been taken, but I knew that my faith was absolute,” he said. “I didn’t need a phone or permission from the guards to talk to God.”
He exercised and prayed to maintain his resolve, all the while not knowing anything that was happening on the outside. Beyond Sam’s amazing ability to stay strong and keep the negativity from overwhelming him, was the behind-the-scenes effort of family and friends to bring Sam home.
A light to the path
Sam’s story is told through many voices in the book, including his parents, siblings, friends and others who played a part in identifying a path to get him out of the Syrian prison. At first, they had no clue what happened or if he even was still alive.
The dropped call may have been from poor reception, but after three days without a call, they became concerned.
“The news of my disappearance was essentially learned through me going dark. I was always very good about keeping in touch,” he said. When time passed and no one had heard from him, they began to worry and started the process of finding information about what was going on.
His parents worked with the U.S. government, “but the government was a little bit handcuffed by a lack of diplomatic ties with Damascus,” Sam said.
Thanks to a long list of people who worked tirelessly, the situation ended peacefully.
“It turned out that my sister’s college roommate is Lebanese, and her uncle was good friends with the head of Lebanon’s internal security, kind of like the equivalent of the FBI in the U.S.,” he said. “The uncle was able to go to his counterparts in Damascus and mediate my release.”
Finished the race and kept the faith
Sam’s career trajectory was altered by the experience from five years ago. He runs his own business and speaks full-time at conferences and conventions. In the book and his presentations, he tells the story of his wrongful imprisonment and the heroic measures that went into his release.
However, the book and talks go beyond the compelling story of his capture and release. The story is about his family and all that he learned through the experience. He wants to use the story to have a positive impact on others and to show people how it’s possible to turn challenges and adversities into assets.
“I don’t want to be known for the things that happened to me, but for the way I responded,” he said.
Bottomline, his reason for writing the book and becoming a speaker “is because God asked me to,” Sam said. Though it is unusual for a hostage situation to end in the way his imprisonment did, he said, “I feel I was given this for a reason; that I survived for a reason.”
He finished his travel quest to visit all 193 countries with a stop in Rio de Janeiro in December 2019, months after his release from Syria.
To this day, he views the world, including his travel journey, through a spiritual lens.
During his trips, he attended mass in 65 countries and visited Catholic churches in 115.
“I’m really grateful to my parents for instilling a strong Catholic faith into me and my four younger siblings,” he said. “Faith was a part of my life before and of course is now, and in an even more significant way.”
