Ishmael's Changes In A Long Way Gone

Yafet Mebrahtu P.4 The author of A Long Way Gone is Ishmael Beah. This book is about his life in Sierra Leone during the civil war. He tells how he suffered from hunger and fear,eventually this lead him to becoming a killer and joining a group of people that kill anyone on sight called the rebels. The rebels are killers that burn villages,kill anyone in sight and recruit child soldiers.

War is destructive and tears apart the most important parts of life. Ishmael Beah was a boy in Sierra Leone when a civil war was taking place Ishmael wrote a book about his experiences titled A Long Way Gone. The book is about how Ishmael went from a boy to a soldier. Ishmael lived happily in a village when it was attacked by the rebels RUF he fled from village to village. Ishmael eventually ended up by the Army and joined them to fight the rebels.

Many people died during this tragic war. People want to escape the dangerous situation that war presents. Ishmael experiences the loss of friends and family, he is forced to ingest drugs including cocaine. Ishmael kills many innocent children and adults in the towns he invades. Ishmael is a victim on the fact that he was

Ishmael Beah’s memoir, A Long Way Gone is appropriate for the Sterling High school English IV curriculum because of Beah’s knowledge that reveals real life events that have occurred in Sierra Leone. Also, the memoir makes the reader grateful for the life he or she has today. For instance, Beah illiterates that the rebels have no sympathy for innocent lives and did not care if they lived or died. Specifically, when the rebels captured Beah and his friends and threatened to kill innocent people in front of them; “We are going to initiate all of you by killing these people in front of you”(34).

He starts to think smarter and travel more cautiously. In addition to this, Ishmael also shows he had acquired intelligence when the secret market was under attack, “I was getting furious, but… I knew I couldn’t afford to lose my temper. The result would be death, since I was now a civilian; I knew that” (205). Prior to living in the rehab center, if Ishmael had been put in the same situation, he most certainly would have snapped and joined the massacre, but while staying with his civilized families, he learned to think about the outcome of his actions beforehand, so he holds his temper and hides

A Long Way Gone is a memoir of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, who struggles to keep his humanity. Ishmael Beah, the author, achieved success once he went off to speak at the United Nations conference and when he realized that he could not go back to the war. Beah achieved success when he went off to New York and spoke at the United Nations conference. As Beah sat around the conference listening to all the other children that represented their country, Beah sat proudly “behind the Sierra Leone name plaque..

One day he was fighting for fun and stealing to survive. Next he was expected to talk about his feelings and make new friends. During their first months in rehabilitation, Ishmael and other boys were constantly in fights. He struggled to adjust to the real world and normal human interaction, after he was a child soldier for two years of living a horrible

The war to Ishmael was simply an issue extraneous to him and far away from his home. He sees people coming from his village were escaping from the rebels leaves his home village, Mataru Jang and for the first time, he gets a shock from a man covered with his son’s blood and a woman who carrying her dead baby on her back. He does not know if his family is alive or dead. He was a boy who never had been through the unexpected situation without learning how to weather the situation. All he could do was “listen[ing] to rap music, trying to memorize the lyrics” (Beah 15) to avoid thinking about the situation at hand.

Throughout Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, themes of reconstruction of a lifestyle are explored as Beah learns to adapt to his current situations. The importance of reconstruction is displayed through Beah’s ability to rebuild his mindset and mannerisms over and over again after being placed into a new environment. This talent for being able to let go of the past and redefine himself is one of the key factors in Beah’s miraculous survival as those around him pass away.

Ishmael Beah’s memoir, A Long Way Gone is appropriate for the Sterling High School English IV curriculum because it exposes the students to the lives of the children in Sierra Leon who’s lives have been altered due to the war and it presents the theme of survival, and what humans will do in order to survive, whether it means hurting others along the way. Right off the bat, Beah starts off his memoir with describing his childhood when all he worried about was going to school and dancing with his brother and friends to the rap music on the tapes he carried around with him everywhere. The way that Beah depicts his childhood, is one without worry and laid-back, but all that changed when the boys decide to leave their village, Mogbwemo, for Mattru

Another event that was probably his final turn before deciding to become a violent child soldier. In chapter 11, Ishmael has just lost his family and blames Gasemu and tries to kill him, “walked behind Gasemu and locked his neck under my arm. I squeezed him as hard as I could” (Beah 96). this quote demonstrates how Ishmael is willing to kill now for revenge as the quote did not show any hesitation from Ishmael. As shown in the article Child soldiers battle traumas in Congo rehab, it reads, “the children, they go back to their villages and they tell other children carrying a gun is not the way” (Nima).

Ishmael says, “I wasn’t sure whether he was unconscious or dead. I didn’t care” (Beah 135). Ishmael is no longer in the war, yet the violence and numbness to it continues. The hell from war made its way into a normal life for Ishmael. He will never be the same Ishmael from before the war.

(1991-2002) Ishmael’s story solely focused on the years he was affected by the war. (1992-1997) The tale begins when with Beah, his brother, and a couple of his friends, heading to another village to put on a performance and while away, they catch wind that their village had been attacked by the RUF (Revolutionary United Front). The boys' having no home to go back to, wander from village to village looking for shelter and safety.

What is the meaning of adversity? Adversity is the difficulties, misfortunes, and sometimes even trials one must face in order to jump over an obstacle. WWll, holocaust, Racism are all adversities that pertain to individuals and events in the past and the present. One of the events that happened was in Sierra Leone and it was a Civil war between different African tribes. This event is explained through the eyes of the main character in the book “A Long Way Gone”, and his name is Ishmael Beah.

Later, UNICEF came and decided to take Ishmael out of the war and put him in a rehabilitation center. In this part of the novel, the reader can see how his desire for killing has controlled him completely. By fighting and killing rebel members in the rehabilitation center and beating up the guards to force them into doing what the children wants to do, the reader can see that the war has changed their ways of life and thoughts. The army was able to change Ishmael 's desires and from that, he became a deadly