A Long Way Gone #1

Just to start, the picture on the cover of this book explains everything. From the little I know about the problems with child abduction in Africa, I can tell that the look on the boys face really shows the emotion that this book is going to offer. The first 44 pages of this book really show how normal life could have been. If you consider our distances apart, I see many similarities between myself and Ishmael, the author and narrator of the memoir. He listens to rap music and finds way to pass the time with his friends. However, apart from the similarities we share Ishmael talks about the horrors of the war from day one. He describes his first views of the war in a gruesome, detailed description of a man carrying his son. "The skin that hung down from their bodies still contained fresh blood" (Beah 13). There is no way I can feel for this. Seeing something like that, not in a movie, would almost instantly change your life on the spot. It would make it all real, and this really proves that it is real. This isn't fiction. What Ishmael is describing is the things that he has seen with his own eyes. His first image of the war was so gruesome and bloody. It only got worse. The second chapter was a terrible dream that would never be forgotten if it happened to anyone. he dreamed about being abducted and living through the horrors of war. What's worse is that the dream is not far off from reality. Beah sees child soldiers all the time and he knows that they are not less dangerous than adult soldiers. These child killers are among the most dangerous. He also talked about the methods of recruitment that he saw. He saw people with the rebel initials carved into their skin, a permanent scar. He held strong by staying with the family.

These abductions remind me a lot of the Holocaust. People are taken from their homes and placed in horrible conditions. While the killings may be on a smaller scale, this is still a mass killing of people. These children are living in fear of their life and almost all of them will never reconnect. We said never again to the Holocaust, but what did that mean. These people aren’t of European decent but they deserve the same treatment. We need to do more to stop mass killings around the world. I’m not even sure what the rebels are fighting for. They simply refer to themselves as “the good side”. I don’t even know if they know the cause.