A Long Way Gone- Entry #2

At this point in the memoir, Beah begins to show just how much one can change given the proper conditions. In the first several pages of the book, Beah gives the reader a glimpse into what his life and personality were like before the rebel army came; this functions as a ‘before shot’ of Beah. In these most recent chapters, Beah speaks of fleeing from the rebel army (The Revolutionary United Front, or the RUF) and the experience of living in isolation and constant fear. He writes, “I felt as if somebody was after me. Often, my shadow would scare me and cause me to run for miles” (49). Seeing as how at this point in the memoir Beah has not yet been abducted by the RUF, passages such as these cause me to realize that the issue of child soldiers is not isolated only to those who have actually been abducted. Beah’s accounts of his time spent wandering the forests of Sierra Leone shows that although many children in the region do not fall victim to abduction, they suffer extreme traumas nonetheless. Furthermore, these chapters showed how the issue of child soldiers and forced fighting bleeds into other grave problems such as poverty and hunger. When Beah speaks of the extreme hunger he faced while fleeing from the rebels, he writes, “One evening, we actually chased a little boy who was eating two ears of boiled corn by himself…We rushed on the boy at the same time, and before he knew what was happening, we had taken the corn from him” (30). Beah’s description of this experience shows that problems such as these are never isolated. Rather, they create a domino effect of problems. Also, as I mentioned at the beginning of this entry, Beah’s treatment towards this young boy illustrates how capable humans are of drastic change, given the right situation. Watching how Beah has changed from the gentle, caring boy he was at the beginning of the memoir to the desperate and nearly animalistic child he has become thus far prepares me for the type of terrifying change that will inherently occur within him once he becomes abducted as a child soldier.