How much is your life worth?

It might seem like a strange question. After all, you are a miracle. You grew from a single cell into a conscious, living being with a powerful mind and a body (with 37 trillion cells) more complex than anything humans have ever built.

So the idea that your life has a price is unsettling. But depending on what you do, where you travel to and for how long, this question has practical application.

In many parts of the world, as a foreigner out in public, you are seen as an easy target —paydirt to the criminals. Practically everyone has a mobile phone now, and so your movements can be observed, reported, and tracked with surprising ease.

Imagine you're being chauffeured in a comfortable SUV, cruising down a highway outside a developing country’s capital. Without warning, a pickup truck bursts from behind a roadside bush and swerves across your path, forcing the driver to brake hard.

Before you can react, the doors swing wide. Amid the shouting, you are wrenched from your vehicle and slammed into the back of a waiting pickup, which then vanishes into the endless desert without a trace. The whole thing is over in less than two minutes.

In December 2008, that was what happened to Canadian diplomats—Robert Fowler and Louis Guay—who were in Niger on a United Nations mission. They would spend the next seven days bound like animals, dragged across thousands of kilometres, before ending up in a region so remote that few Malians have ever ventured there.

Just a few months earlier, all the way across the African continent, Canadian freelance journalist Amanda Lindhout and her Australian boyfriend were snatched in an almost identical fashion on the outskirts of Somalia’s capital.

Ten years later, French-Canadian Edith Blais and her Italian boyfriend decided to do a road trip from Morocco to Togo. On a lonely stretch of highway in Burkina Faso near the border with Togo, they were stopped by gunmen, who had been waiting for them.

Like Fowler and Guay, the two lovebirds were transported all the way to the desert wasteland between Mali and Algeria. They were held captive for 450 days. Picture yourself in a bare-bones tent enduring daytime temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius and near-freezing nights.

Fowler, Lindhout and Blais are the lucky ones. They survived their ordeal and wrote a book about it. Not so for Canadian geologist Kirk Woodman. In January 2019, a dozen gunmen burst into his exploration camp in eastern Burkina Faso and took him away. Tragically, his body was found the next day. He was 56.

It’s rarely talked about, but most diplomats, businesspeople, and consultants carry a kidnap and ransom (K&R) insurance policy, when they need to be in a risky part of the world.

Closer to home, depending on where you live, (sexual) assault and robbery can happen anywhere and at anytime.

We all want to be safe. Is personal safety a matter of following a set of rules? Not quite. Developing a mindset of situational awareness will serve you well—wherever you are.

There are good books on this subject that are worth exploring.

Dan Schilling, a former U.S. Air Force Combat Controller, offers practical strategies for staying safe in his book The Power of Awareness.

He outlines six key ideas:

• 1: Be Situationally Aware
• 2: Trust and Use Your Intuition
• 3: Determine if You Have a Problem
• 4: Develop a Plan
• 5: Act Decisively
• 6: Regroup & Recover

Some scenarios: If you become aware that someone is following you, how should you confront that person? In any potential threat, confrontation, or attack, what is the best course of action?

While this may not be the definitive book on personal safety, if it helps you become more aware of your surroundings and trust your intuition, it might just spare you trouble both at home and overseas down the road.

As for Fowler, Lindhout, and Blais, were they dealt a really bad hand? How much of the bad luck was of their own making? What could they have done differently? You could read their books and decide for yourself.

(Hai Van Le is the author of Into the Unknown, a novel about a geologist held hostage by Islamic fundamentalists in Mali. For more information, visit https://haivanle.com)