Text to society connection for " A Long Way Gone" by Ishmael Beah

war ruins the lives of everyone who gets caught in it. War is like a hurricane, reckless and lethal, it cannot be controlled. While those at the eye of the storm aim to solve conflicts, the lives that are caught in the edges of the hurricane are ripped violently to pieces. Ishmael is one among millions who were sucked up into the Sierra Leone civil war. He had no argument with either side, an innocent bystander. In the beginning, the war didn't seem real to him. It seemed to far off and too surreal to be true. The war put him in state of complete and utter desperation, stripping his family and friends from him like meat is torn off the bones of a defeated animal, leaving nothing but a bare skeleton. Ishmael was only 12 when the war became a reality for him. He was travelling to a neighboring village to compete in a talent show as a rapper. Rebels attacked the village before they got there, and ishmael was separated from his family. He and his friends wandered from village to village searching for food, surviving several close encounters with death along the way. Ishmael was eventually separated from his friends. He was taken by the sierra leone military, given an AK-47, and made a child soldier. Ishmael and his fellow soldiers were given drugs to keep them fighting. He watched his comrades die. He killed rebels. After this went on for a few years, men from UNICEF showed up and took many of them into rehab. To find out how the book ends, you can read "A Long Way Gone" for yourself.

To synthesize our new realizations with society, we researched the effects of war on children. The article that we looked at talked about how some children are put on the front lines of the battlefield, completely wrecking all chances of a complete childhood right in front of their eyes. War ruins childrens education. Because most development of the brain occurs in the early years of a person's life and child soldiers spend most if not all of their time fighting, opportunities for education are not present. Most child soldiers (if they do not die on the battlefield, which sadly most do), are not able to 'catch up' with the educational standards of today. This connects to Ishmael's life because the war ripped everything he had right out of his hands, leaving him with nothing but drug addictions and faded memories of his family and friends. All opportunities that a human being should have were crushed for him. The war destroyed everything he had.

-Written by Ahmed Ashraf and Matt Le Cras-