City woman who died in Cambodia loved to travel

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This article was published 15/11/2017 (3183 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg woman who loved to travel and was just beginning a teaching career fell sick and died this week while on a year-long backpacking trek through Asia, a long-time friend said Wednesday.

Samantha Gilkes says her 27-year-old friend, Abbey Gail Amisola, died in a hostel in Cambodia after getting medicine.

”We haven’t heard much about what has happened, just that her and her friend were ill, they went to the pharmacist to get some medication,” Gilkes said.

The federal government said a Canadian citizen had died in Cambodia, but would not release details or confirm the citizen’s identity, citing privacy laws.

”Consular officials in Cambodia are providing consular assistance to the family and are also in contact with local authorities,” Philip Hannan, spokesperson for Global Affairs Canada, wrote in an email.

The Manitoba Teachers Society said Amisola was a member of the union and expressed condolences to her family.

“We are touched and saddened to hear about the sudden passing of our MTS member Abbey Gail Amisola. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Abbey’s family and those who knew her,” the teacher’s society president Norm Gould said in a statement.

Amisola was listed as a substitute teacher from 2015 through to the end of the school year in June with Winnipeg’s Seven Oaks School Division. 

Gilkes, along with her brother Tyler, set up a fundraising page to help Amisola’s family. The site had raised more than $11,000 by Wednesday afternoon.

”I met Abbey when I was nine and … she’s a really amazing person. She has a huge heart of gold and she would be the first person to help anybody in a situation like this,” Gilkes said.

Amisola had recently earned her education degree and set off in September for a trek through Asia, she added.

”She loved to travel. She was funny. She had a zest for life. She was just a really good person,” Gilkes said.

”Her goal was to experience the world and see what it had to offer.”

A British newspaper, The Daily Mail, reported Amisola was travelling with a 22-year-old English woman named Natalie Jade Seymour, and the two had taken over the counter medication after suffering symptoms of food poisoning.

British media covered the deaths extensively.

Seymour’s grieving mother told the Mail that Seymour had flown off last week to join Amisola in Cambodia. The pair had met while travelling the year before and struck up a friendship. Seymour had just returned from Bali, the second exotic destination she’d visited this fall before meeting up with Amisola in Cambodia.

Seymour had  told her mother she wasn’t feeling well and had stomach pains after joining up with Amisola. By that point, the pair were in Kampot, a well known Cambodian tourist destination, Seymour’s mother Wendy Bowler told the Mail

“The hotel manager was going up and down with drinks and he told them they should go to a medical centre,” Seymour’s mother said.

“They decided to sleep it off but never woke up, or that’s what I hoped,” she said.

A second British paper The Sun quoted an unnamed local in Kampot saying that over the counter medication often included opiates which are cheap in the notorious drug mecca.

As of Wednesday, there was no word about results of possible autopsies on the young women and no response had been received  from the Cambodia’s mission to the United Nations in New York which was handling inquiries.

– with Free Press files