Boy soldier, Ishmael Beah tells his story
Naa Amerley Sackey
Issue date: 4/17/09 Section: Campus News
On Wednesday April 15th, the Students Arts and Speakers Series (SASS) hosted Ishmael Beah, author of A LONG WAY GONE: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. Beah is currently a member of the Human Rights Watch Children's Rights Division Advisory Committee and has spoken before the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities (CETO) at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, and many other NGO panels on children affected by war. In addition, he holds a B.A. in Political Science. His book, which is an autobiography, has earned several reviews from prestigious newspapers and magazines such as The Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly etc.
Now 26 years old, Ishmael Beah has truly come a long way from the little boy forced out of his village in his home country of Sierra Leone because of war. His book is an account of the time he spent as a boy soldier during the Civil War in Sierra Leone. After fleeing rebels at age 12, he was picked up by the government army at thirteen and became a boy soldier. He ended up in the United States after being released three years later by the government and was sent to a UNICEF rehabilitation center, where this boy who had committed atrocities that would make even grown men shudder, fought to regain his humanity. In his book, Ishmael Beah presents us with the picture of war through the eyes of a boy soldier, which he sums up as "This is how wars are fought now: by children, traumatized, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s."
SASS Committee members Brian Waddell and Nicholas Poche who organized the event say that student response preceding the event was enormous. Many tickets were picked up from the Center for Student Involvement prior to the event, which gave them hope for the program's success. SASS did a wonderful job of promoting the event well in advance by not only placing eye catching flyers and posters everywhere, but also by the flag display which they put up outside the entrance to the Unistructure. The 3,000 little white surveyor flags that were erected have a deeper meaning than that of mere aestheticism. The flags represented the hundreds of child soldiers fighting conflicts around the world and were meant to motivate us here at Bryant to go and hear Beah tell his story, so that we would learn about the predicament of child soldiers and would in turn become advocates against this.
Now 26 years old, Ishmael Beah has truly come a long way from the little boy forced out of his village in his home country of Sierra Leone because of war. His book is an account of the time he spent as a boy soldier during the Civil War in Sierra Leone. After fleeing rebels at age 12, he was picked up by the government army at thirteen and became a boy soldier. He ended up in the United States after being released three years later by the government and was sent to a UNICEF rehabilitation center, where this boy who had committed atrocities that would make even grown men shudder, fought to regain his humanity. In his book, Ishmael Beah presents us with the picture of war through the eyes of a boy soldier, which he sums up as "This is how wars are fought now: by children, traumatized, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s."
SASS Committee members Brian Waddell and Nicholas Poche who organized the event say that student response preceding the event was enormous. Many tickets were picked up from the Center for Student Involvement prior to the event, which gave them hope for the program's success. SASS did a wonderful job of promoting the event well in advance by not only placing eye catching flyers and posters everywhere, but also by the flag display which they put up outside the entrance to the Unistructure. The 3,000 little white surveyor flags that were erected have a deeper meaning than that of mere aestheticism. The flags represented the hundreds of child soldiers fighting conflicts around the world and were meant to motivate us here at Bryant to go and hear Beah tell his story, so that we would learn about the predicament of child soldiers and would in turn become advocates against this.
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