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Winnipeg teacher survives brutal attack in Tanzania

A Winnipeg schoolteacher who was beaten, raped and stabbed while doing humanitarian work in Tanzania, is determined to return there, despite the brutal attack.

"You can't hold a whole community accountable for one person's actions," Amanda Furst told the CBC. "I have years of amazing experiences and one day of a really awful one."

Furst, who founded Growing Opportunities International, or The GO! Team, has spent the past decade working in Rwanda and Tanzania helping villagers on the ground build everything from daycares and libraries to rainwater catchments. In 2011, she was awarded The Manitoba Red Cross Young Humanitarian of the Year.

Last summer was to be the latest shining moment for Furst and her team; the realization of Hero's Home, a small community centre and living quarters outside the town of Kisesa. But that all changed in the early morning hours of July 29, when Furst, out for a jog, was attacked by a stranger.

"He ran up next to me and asked for money," Furst recalled. "Then he grabbed my neck, pulled me to the roadside and managed to rape me."

He also beat her and tried to stab her, stopping only when villagers heard the commotion and chased him off. What followed, Furst said, was "a blur." There were weeks of hospital trips between Tanzania and Nairobi. It took three different surgeries to repair torn tendons on her hands, slashed by the knife as she'd tried to defend herself. She endured grueling anti-viral drugs, unsanitary broken needles and corrupt justice officials (who arrested a friend of hers and to this day, refuse to release him, unless Furst gives them money).

"He wasn't the one who did this to me," Furst said. "I've known him for four years. I know he wasn't the one."

So much "great" lost in the pain

But Furst's greatest sorrow, she said, was that in the aftermath of the attack, the "heroic" efforts of her co-workers in overcoming obstacles to building the community centre was briefly lost.

"There was so much great news. It's unfortunate that [the attack] happened this year, at the time when everything else was going so well." Furst said. "[These] are incredible people who will never make it onto the news, who will never be in a movie, who will never have their time of fame, but they're the ones getting up in the morning and doing the jobs that need to be done in their community."

Which is why Furst intends to return to Tanzania next summer, to join her closest friends and continue alongside them to grow their communities.

"That is very much the take-away here. It's not the bitter, it's the sweet that's happening all the time," Furst said. "I'm really grateful."