Author and former child soldier Ishmael Beah spoke about issues surrounding children and war  in a coastal African nation and the importance of education at CCBC Dundalk on Nov. 17.
    Beah’s memoir, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, made the national best-seller list in 2007 and was selected for CCBC’s Community Book Connection this year.
    “I want to thank all of you for taking the time to introduce yourself to a country that was not very well known, to learn about Sierra Leone,” Beah said to an audience packed with teachers and students.
    The former child soldier recounted stories from his youth, describing life in Africa before the war. He recalled listening to hip-hop,  reading Shakespeare and attending a one-room schoolhouse with no roof.
    “Some people sat out under a mango tree because there wasn’t enough room,” Beah said.
    Civil war broke out and Beah’s village, Mattru Jong, was attacked by the rebel army known as the Revolutionary United Front in 1993, interrupting his childhood around age 12, he said.
    There has been some dispute over Beah’s credibility, as The Australian reported in 2008 that the book contained instances cited as false or events that never occurred. Beah responded to the charges in a January article in Publisher’s Weekly.
    CCBC has been using Beah’s book in classroom study and discussion, events and programs that explore war and its effects.
    In his book, Beah describes a life on the run for a year or more. He traveled from village to village, looking for food, hiding from rebels and dodging bullets with a bevy of young boys.
    In a culture where innocence was celebrated and the young did not dare raise their voices to adults, Beah said, “innocence was now feared deeply.”
    Boys were made to fight, forced to kill their parents or watch their sisters being raped, Beah said. The children learned survival skills quickly and traveled at night because it was easier to see the glowing bullets fly by.
    “No one anticipated that the war would be so brutal. ... Everything changed. Even our relationship to nature changed. We no longer enjoyed it,” said Beah.
    He described how rivers, once great for swimming, were  bloodied and overflowing with dead bodies. Children “were probably the only people in the war that wanted nothing to do with it.”
    Beah’s immediate family was killed. And when he found safety on a government army base when he was about 13 years old, he was recruited to fight.
    The training lasted one week. Beah said he learned to eat in 60 seconds, how to use an AK-47 and was given drug cocktails that consisted of heroin, cocaine and brown-brown, a mixture of heroin and gunpowder.
    The author told his audience the drugs made him numb and distrustful.     “If you didn’t do what they say, they kill you,” Beah said. “When young kids cried for their mothers, they were shot. ... The more violence you committed, the more loyalty you showed.”
    In his memoir Beah tells of committing horrific acts, wiping out whole villages of civilians with his army brothers and watching his friends die one by one.
    Beah, who turns 29 this week, was rescued by UNICEF and taken to a rehabilitation center in 1996. He went to live with an uncle and cousins he had never met. Later the Sierra Leonean native was selected to attend a New York conference where he met the woman he now calls his “new mother.”
    Beah engaged the students in the John R. Ravekes Theatre on the Dundalk campus, balancing his tales of hardship with light-hearted anecdotes. Though he still has occasional nightmares, Beah joked about benefiting from sleepless nights in college and his introduction to American food.
    The trip to New York was Beah’s first time on a plane and his first glance at a salad.
    “I remember thinking, Why would people want to eat grass?” Beah said through laughter. He recalled “an overwhelming number of white people” walking around in New York.
    Beah said his family had a rich tradition of oral history and storytelling. Only some of his extended family remains living, and his home and personal possessions were destroyed in the war.
    Beah wrote essays explaining why he had no previous report cards in order to attend school in New York. He then attended Oberlin College in Ohio.
    “In order for me to recreate my own history, I had to start writing it down,” Beah said. “I felt a responsibility to write about it.”
    At CCBC Dundalk the author revealed he had not originally planned to publish the book, but he realized his stories had meaning for a lot of people.
    “People take [access to education] very lightly in this culture,” Beah said, adding that young people in Sierra Leone don’t have the same access to supplies or teachers that American students have. “I don’t want people to feel bad for opportunities they have ... but to be aware that some people need help.”
    Beah said he is working on a second book and hopes to continue spreading awareness about children in war as well as serve as proof they can be rehabilitated. The author is a member of the Human Rights Watch Children’s Rights Division Advisory Committee and lives in New York City.
    Beah lost his family, his home and his possessions in the war, but he said an education has been invaluable to him.
    “For the first time in my life, I realized I was gaining something nobody could ever take away from me again,” Beah said. “Every human being has remarkable strength in them.”