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Ishmael Beah - A Long Way Gone - Episode 3 - Reintegration And New Life!
Hi, I’m Christy Shriver, and we’re here to discuss books that have changed the world and have changed us.
And I’m Garry Shriver and this is the How to Love Lit Podcast. This is our third and final episode discussing Ismael Beah’s personal memoir A Long Way Gone, Memoir of a Boy Soldier. In Week one, we discussed the first ten chapters of the book, introduced a very brief history of Sierra Leone, as a country, as well as a little background as to what started the civil unrest and why it lasted for so long in the country of Sierra Leone. It came down to corruption on the part of the government, then of course, there were the diamonds, the ones everyone wanted, blood diamonds as the world has come to call them. Last episode, we only discussed five chapters, but they are five brutal chapters, the chapters where Beah discusses his entrance into the army and just a few of his experiences as a child soldier. These are brutal, tragic and unfortunately more common than we would like to admit.
I appreciated that he didn’t harp on these. I assume he could probably have fiilled a volume listing one terrible atrocity after another, but he didn’t. He carefully chose events that supported specific points that he was trying to make. One point being how callous he and the other children became to the humanity of others, through the drugs, by watching and modeling the behaviors of the adults. It was clear that child soldiers are braver and more expendable than adults and widely used by all sides of the conflict.
This episode, we will discuss the rest of the book, chapters 16-21. Here Beah explores his onw reintegration as a child soldier back into the world of real sentient human beings, the kind that feel empathy for each other and live peacefully with one another. We only see the beginning of Beah’s journey. We go with him as he physically escapes the war and Sierra Leone. But before that happens, we watch his journey out of drug addiction and back into mainstream living, something not even the United Nations was sure was possible for child soldiers to do. His particular case is an incredible miracle and one that is atypical of most child soldiers. Not all soldiers end up being adopted by upper-class American parents, but truth be told, thousands have been able to reintegrate into schools and local communities. The question people want to know is what can we do to create hope for them?
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