Hi, I'm Caitlin Van Mall, host of I survived.

As you may have heard in the past few weeks, we are relaunching season one.

We love these stories and are excited for them to reach new audiences.

Episode 3 is Amanda, a teacher just minding her own business on her lunch break, but bad luck put her in the path of a man who would change her life.

Amanda is a great example of someone who kept their wits about them in a very stressful situation and made it out alive. But this is also a story of forgiveness and

empathy, which you'll hear in episode 3 of I survived, the hardest 20 yards I have ever walked.

This episode contains sensitive content.

Listener discretion is advised.

I didn't mind telling people what happened,

but I realized really quickly that people were really nervous when I told them.

In 2008, Amanda was working as an ESL teacher at a high school in Charlotte, North Carolina.

I was not actually really intended to move to Charlotte. I just thought I would go somewhere outside of North Carolina actually

But I got this internship and then my aunt and uncle actually lived in Charlotte. I lived with them at the beginning,

but at that time I had a roommate who was my best friend.

She was 24 years old and hadn't been teaching for long,

but she loved it.

I worked in working with kids for a really long time,

so I taught some lessons when I was a kid,

and I worked as a tutor in college,

and I really liked it, and I really loved my job. I was teaching at a very high poverty school and I mean we were like

90% of the students were below the poverty level. So basically all my kids were from different countries at a lot of

kids who had limited formal education in the past so they hadn't been in a formal

...