A Long Way Gone Essay

For a great deal of foreign and civil and economic disputes, there are a great number of Americans who believe that we should keep to our own business. However, what happens when the dirty dealings and disparagement of other countries becomes an increasingly taxing problem for the United States? At what point should we really commit to intervening and solving these conflicts which spill over into the rest of the civilized world? Most importantly, what is the most effective and economically sound tactic for resolution at our disposal? The plight of Africa has been well known and well covered in the media for generations in the United States. Most of us have been exposed to the turmoil faced by those living on the hottest continent on earth …show more content…
Even though Sierra Leone is more than 9,100 km away from Somalia, the two countries face similar problems of poverty and civil warfare brought on by severely limited natural resources, dramatically low wages, and environmental hardship. Throughout the arid continent, there is a sinister demand for child soldiers as they are recruited by groups which both take part in the raiding of peaceful civilizations with families. As Ishmael Beah described in his memoir A Long Way Gone, the unavoidable choice given to a great number of African children is to either kill and take or forfeit what you have and perish. However, Beah also states with assurance, “ . . . children have the resilience to outlive their sufferings, if given a chance.” Having been a child soldier himself in Sierra Leone, this gives hope for those who have no choice but to endure the tragedies of warfare and to take up arms to protect their livelihood as early as five years old. Beah goes on to describe that the mentality of the child soldier is one of vengeance: that the severe losses inspire them to dedicate their lives into taking from their others and that trust for close neighbors is destroyed in all