Book Report: A Long Walk To Water

As my Mathematics professor always says, “Helping one person might not change the whole world, but it could change the world for one person.” For some people who live in the third world countries such as Ethiopia and Sudan, even a few dollars or a cup of water is a great help. However, in today’s society, most people only care about themselves and forget to think of others in need. Less and less people are willing to help others. Moreover, some people once accepted help, but they forget that many are like them that need help. The book A Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park, is a story about Salva, who is forced to leave his family and village because of the civil war in Sudan. He spends many years to cross Sudan to reach Ethiopia. Unfortunately, in the process of crossing the desert, Salva loses his uncle, who had been encouraging and protecting him in this arduous journey. Finally, Salva becomes a leader of a group of 1500 boys and arrive a refugee camp near the Gilo River. Afterward, six years later, he comes to the United States and lives with a family in Rochester, New York. Many years later he finds his father and starts a volunteer group to build wells in South Sudan for helping people to solve the water crisis. In this story, Salva is …show more content…
Some have died, but others are still alive. Even though Salva desperately needs the water for himself, he wants to give some water to the collapsed men. “If he were older and stronger, would he have given water to those men? Or would he, like most of the group, have kept his water for himself?” (Linda, 80) Although his uncle stops him to share his water and food to those collapsed men, we can still see his helpfulness in his thoughts. As an eleven-year-old child, he does not only care about his own life, but also care about others even though he does not know them