Life in Sierra Leone

In the autobiography A Long Way Gone: The Memoirs of a Boy Soldier Ishmael Beah shows and explains the troubles that the poor village people have to go through. Sierra Leone is a scary place for them. They are in the middle of a war and have trouble finding food and all the things they need to live. “10,000 Sierra Leonean children have become separated from their families during the displacement process. They are especially vulnerable, and may end up in informal foster care, in institutions, or on the street.” (http://www.cryfreetown.org/SCF.htm)This war gives them a harder time then they are already having by “increasingly making children serve as combatants or as cooks, informants, porters, bodyguards, sentries, and spies. Many child soldiers belong to organized military units, wear uniforms, and receive explicit training, their lethality enhanced by the widespread availability of lightweight assault weapons. Other children participate in relatively unstructured but politically motivated acts of violence, such as throwing stones or planting bombs. (http://pangaea.org/street_children/africa/armies.htm) According to InfoPlease, the conflict was officially declared over in Jan. 2002. An estimated 50,000 people were killed in the decade-long civil war. The UN installed its largest peacekeeping force in the country (17,000 troops). (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0107959.html) The war from Beah’s point of view was horrifying; he had to jump a 2 year old kid with corn to survive: “I felt guilty about it for a few minutes, but in our position, there wasn’t much time for remorse.” The first day of his capture was so scary everyone was speechless. Beah showed this fear when the soldiers came out: “We were in the middle of the grassland walking in single file, our shirts on our shoulders or heads, when suddenly three rebels rose from behind the dried grasses and pointed their guns at Gibrilla.” That was just the first move they made towards Beah and the group, until they took everyone. One soldier decided to be the leader and tell the group whose boss. The leader took out his fury on them: “He was behind us, aiming his gun at our heads, and at some point he said, if any of you makes a move, I will kill everyone.” Beah’s book A Long Way Gone: The Memoirs of a Boy Soldier states the things that the poor people had to go through in the war and living the normal, stressful life in Sierra Leone.