As much as I enjoyed every reading we were assigned throughout the course of this semester, Ishmael Beah’s book, “A Long Way Gone,” was the one in which I most looked forward to as well as the one that most corresponded to my personal interests and aspirations. The correlation between Ishmael Beah’s personal story and the stories of war-torn areas in Africa, such as Darfur, are significantly similar. For the purposes of this particular comparison, however, I will not be using specific quotes from Beah’s book, but rather his themes and concepts as a whole.
Ishmael Beah is a boy from Sierra Leone who experiences the civil war as both a civilian and a soldier. Ultimately, he survives and rehabilitates his way to America. Beah, his older brother, and some of their friends learn their home has been attacked by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). The boys begin a long process of attempting to flee from war violence and eventually get captured by rebel forces. Ishmael Beah gets separated from the rest of the boys and, after a few other occurrences, ends up being forcibly recruited by the army to fight. The RUF used drugs, war movies, fellow soldiers, and combat violence to brainwash Beah into becoming a mindless killer before he was finally released from the army into UNICEF.
In relation to the experiences Ishmael Beah faced while he was being forced to be a child soldier in Sierra Leone, the children in Darfur are being psychologically damaged in similar ways. I believe that one tends to forget what happens to the children throughout these war-torn territories and genocides. An article written by Nancy Blackmon for the Andalusia Star-News titled, “Has Anything Really Changed,” showcases the comparison of the Holocaust with current genocides in Africa.
The author reiterates her experience during a lecture given to some high-school students by Holocaust survivors themselves.
“…One of the survivors, Max Steinmetz said he was thrown into a boxcar with almost no food or water. He was 17 at the time, close to the age of many of those in the audience who heard him talk about the genocide of the Jews under Hitler…The same thing is happening in Darfur and the world is watching it happen just like it did when the Holocaust began in Germany all those years ago…Despite society’s advances, the people and sadly the children in Darfur face a life that is unimaginable to me. It is impossible to think of fear and turmoil being part of day-to-day life. It hurts to think about children alone, frightened and hungry because their parents died as a result of this genocide…”
As is clearly stated, the children are the ones who seem to suffer the greatest amount of damage. Not only are they facing the immense amount of physical tortures and horror stories, but they are in many cases young enough in which they do not understand the full affects of what is going on around them. Let alone what is happening to them personally and their loved ones as well. Ishmael Beah’s story is one of the few that consists of having a happy ending to it. Most of the children who are either forcibly enrolled in their armies as child soldiers or affected as civilians do not recover from the psychological and physical damages done to them. And in some equally unfortunate cases, do not survive at all.
Ishmael Beah’s “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier”
http://www.andalusiastarnews.com/news/2009/apr/07/has-anything-really-changed/
I agree with this. People do tend to overlook children and what is ultimately going to happen to them. I am looking at Darfur in my blog as well and I found an article talking about all of the women and children that are dying because of the lack of medical care and the aid that has been taken away from the people still living there.
Sometimes we forget that children are so impressionable. They are at a young age and not fully developed. What will happen to them when they see all of this violence and killing going on around them? Especially in Darfur where rape is being used as a weapon. If they survive all of the fighting, will they continue on thinking this is right?
It breaks my heart that so many young people are being used in armies like this. In many cases, a young life is cut drastically short, and for what? To have an extra body fighting? It isn’t right.
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In the end, I do agree that children tend to get the short end of the stick. I personally think that adults are much better at coping with tragedies than kids are. Adults have a much better way of looking at the spectrum of events and coming up with what I would like to think as a logical diagnosis. Also, adults are more cognitively prepared to deal with concepts such as death.
Children, on the other hand, have a loose concept of what it means to die. I know this is a corny reference but there is this episode of the Waltons where Elizabeth takes in a sick raccoon. The raccoon ends up dying of some sickness and she hates John (her father) for not being able to stop death. It takes Geno, a young adult from New York to show or even tell her what death is.
On the tangent of Beah’s account in Sierra Leone; readers can envision the psychological trauma that these boy soldiers endure when they finally are able to leave the fronts of war. As a young boy, seeing destruction and death leaves these boys emotionally scarred. We can see how easy it is for Ishmael to slit a man’s throat, have no remorse, then be praised for how flawless the task preformed was. Then even in the end we see that even after 7 plus months of rehabilitation, he still has flashbacks to the gun fire, explosions, and fire.
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Probably the thing that most affected me this semester was my reading of A Long Way Gone, since there are so many powerful associations that come along with the concept of child soldiering. It may be easy to make children into soldiers, many of them glorify it in their games and like to pretend that they are army fighters, but obviously no child can know what the horrors of war are really like.
Children are so innocent, and they don’t deserve to be shoved into the role of murdering machines at such a young age. If they manage to survive the war, which many do not, it is disturbing to think what life must be like for them as they grow up and are able to reasonably consider what they have done. Their entire lives may be ruined or sacrificed unless they are able to be rehabilitated, like Ishmael was eventually. For many survivors, they will have to go back to life as they were before, but with the scars of war and misery clouding their young minds.
Children are the future, and if we as a society allow them to made into monsters at a young age, then we are only inviting a future of monstrous deeds to be carried out all over the world.
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