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A Long Way Gone Essay

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A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah illustrates Beah’s childhood under Sierra Leone's Civil war in the 1990s. The book recounts Beah’s experience as a 12 year old boy struggling to find his family. Although this book mainly follows Beah, it also gives a lot of insight on the instability in African countries like Sierra Leone.
Ishmael Beah was a normal child before the Civil war in Sierra Leone, which is what the beginning of the book illustrates. In the early chapters, Beah talks about his childhood, which seemed to be very normal (Beah, 6). However, his childhood would take a drastic turn for the worse. When visiting his friends in Mattru Jong, Beah runs into swarms of people talking of rebellion. One passerby warned …show more content…
Many of the problems come from political instability, which can destroy a country, this is exactly what happened in Sierra Leone. This type of political instability stems from the government. Certain people in the country did not believe in what the government was doing, so they believed the only way to fix it was to assert their opinions with force. This lead to the creation of the rebel forces. To combat these rebel forces, the government sees that there are thousands of children, like Ishmael Beah, who have no home, no family, and no place to get food. So, the government sees these children and realizes they can use these children as an advantage for themselves. The easiest part about this is convincing the children to be on the government's side too. All the government has to do is give the children a gun and tell them the rebel forces killed their family. This also sheds light on the violence occurring in countries that are much like Sierra Leone. The government could care less about the thousands of people dying, they just need to kill off the rebel forces and win the war. Although Beah, and many other “veterans” are treated very well after the war, there is really that can be done about the memories, scars, and lives lost in this civil war. In this case, time does not heal all

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