Teach This 3: A Long Way Gone; the Story of a Child Soldier

1.         A Long Way Gone is a memoir by Ishmael Beah, a child soldier during the Sierra Leone civil war. The book follows Beah from age 11 to age 16. It follows him as he deals with the death of his family, his time as a child soldier, and his rehabilitation. He is eventually adopted by a family who gives him a second chance at a normal life.

2.         A Long Way Gone focuses on the devastation war causes. Beah’s family killed very early in the book, and the emptiness he feels leads him to being recruited by the Sierra Leone army. The army gives him a sense of camaraderie and companionship to replace his dead family. Beah goes into great detail to describe the horrors of the war and the atrocities he is pushed to commit. The book holds nothing back, and I think that is the memoir’s greatest strength. Beah shows the reader what war is like. War is gruesome, horrible, depraved, and leads to survivors developing significant symptoms of PTSD.  Beah doesn’t shy away from this and, I think it makes for a more compelling book. A Long Way Gone is an important book for students to read because of its genuine portrayal of child soldiers, and it makes for a powerful cross curricular lesson plan.

            Beah’s account of the war is raw and powerful. When he joins the war he is a young child, but after training and being filled with drug fueled rage, Beah turns into a corrupted young man. Even before the war as just a wondering child, Beah is forced to deal with the horrors of war. Beah writes, “Bodies, furniture, clothes, and all kinds of property were scattered all over. On one verandah we saw an old man sitting in a chair as if asleep. There was a bullet hole in his forehead, and underneath the stoop lay the bodies of two men whose genitals, limbs, and hands had been chopped off by a machete” (40). The brutality that Beah witnesses even before his first battle shows just the beginning of the terror that he goes through. Nonetheless, I think the rough nature of the book serves a purpose in the classroom. This isn’t an adult telling the students about a man who was chopped up. This is a boy who is around the same age as its readers. Students will empathize with a character who is similar to them but has experiences that are 10 times worse than the average student. The honesty Beah has with his readers is what will win over students and lead them to think deeply.

 It is not just the horrors that Beah goes through that students will gravitate to. Even after Beah is rescued from the war, he has immense struggles with recovery. Beah writes “It took several months before I began to relearn how to sleep without the aid of medicine. I would dream that a faceless gunman had tied me up and begun to slit my throat with the zigzag edge of his bayonet. I would feel the pain that the knife inflicted as the man sawed my neck” (179). Beah’s pain is not over even after he leaves the battlefield. This speaks to the mental illness that develops when people go through war. Not only that, the book may assist in helping students deal with stresses that they are going through. Hopefully none of them experiences the horrors of war, but many student homes may be filled with anger, rage, or immense sadness. It is powerful for students to read about the experience of someone like them who eventually recovered, despite all odds.  

            Educators need to bridge the gap between what is real and unreal to students. War is something that our students just hear on the news or see in video games. War is basically out of sight and out of mind. Beah brings the subject to the students so that it becomes both literature and a part of contemporary history.

According to Katherine Bucher and KaaVonia:
“biographies personalize history by focusing on the motivations and driving forces behind personal actions… if adolescents are to realize that history is more than the study of dead people, educators must use the connections between inquiry and biography to help young adults se the relationship between past events and the realties of the present.” (257).

When students read Beah’s work they are making connections between events in history and their lives. This connectivity also makes reading A Long Way Gone a cross curricular activity. Students are focusing on the literature while making real world connections to history and international social studies. This cross curricular thinking will push students to think deeper and metacognitively about what they are reading. By showing students that this sort of book is applicable in more ways than one, we are revealing how important reading can be.

3.         One activity I would have the students do is to write a letter to Ishmael Beah. I want to further the idea that when students read this book, they are connecting with reality, not just a dead past. The actions Beah took are real and were impactful. I want students to understand that their actions can have just as much meaning. Though I would let students write about almost anything they wanted to Beah, I would like them to focus on his recovery and how he has connected to the world again, given the experiences he has been through.

            I would have students do research about a country that is in some kind of war. Specifically, I would want students to focus on countries that have large amounts of child soldiers. I would like this lesson to be in cooperation with a social studies or history class. I would put students in pairs and ask them to make a presentation about the country they picked. Students will relate their research with contextual evidence found in the text. Students will present to the class and field questions after they are done. Students who are listening to the presentations will write down 2 questions they have for each presentation.

             I would have students write a short 4-5 paragraph essay about Beah’s recovery in the rehabilitation center. I would want the students to focus on what struggles Beah has. Why does he dislike the people who are trying to help him? Do they think that Beah’s violence nature will ever leave him? I want students to explore Beah’s PTSD and how we can use Beah’s recovery to help people with the illness here. Students will peer review each other’s paper, giving substantial notes. They will then make corrections and additions to their essay before handing it in.

Works Cited

Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Print.

Bucher, Katherine, and KaaVonia Hinton. Young Adult Literature: Exploration, Evaluation, and Appreciation. 3rd ed. Boston: Pearson, 2014. Print.