A few stimulating reads...

The teacher book club I'm a part of has read a few books recently that have made me think a lot about current social issues. About a month ago we read Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea. This book made me think a lot about the conditions in the country just north of my present home. The graphic novel, written from the perspective of a French Canadian, shows a foreigner's experience in the country. It was crazy for me to begin to think about how different the social conditions are just 3 hours north of me. People are extremely poor and subject to the whims of a crazy leader. This particular issue is one that I have been learning about at work as well. TCIS's Amnesty chapter is focusing it's winter campaign on raising awareness of North Korean refugees in South Korea. What I have learned through my involvement with this group is that is that if any North Koreans try to escape, they put their entire family at risk; whole families are jailed for the "wrong-doings" of a single extended family member. People are beaten or killed for much more trivial actions. Justice or fair trials do not seem to exist. From my perspective, there are so many motivations that people have for wanting a different life. However, it is heartbreaking to know that when people survive the strenuous process it takes to safely make it to South Korea (usually involving moving as an illegal immigrant through numerous other countries first... people have to flee to the north before they can safely get south), life does not get much easier. There is a good deal of discrimination that occurs in this country against refugees. Anyhow, this book is a good first read for anyone who knows little about social conditions in North Korea.


This month's book was also a powerful read. In A long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier the (now) 28-year-old Ishmael Beah shares his true personal story of his involvement in Sierra Leone's civil war. At the age of 12, rebel attacks forced Beah to flee his village and wander the forests with several other children. By the age of 13, Beah was faced with the choice of death or joining the army. After he became a soldier, Beah spent nearly three years doing horrible things under the influences of copious amounts of cocaine, unimaginable fear, and emotionally manipulative leaders. When the UN finally rescued him at the age of 16, Beah entered a rehabilitation center with unimaginable emotional scars and palpable anger. The book takes readers through his journey as his sheltered happy childhood is ripped from him, as he is transformed into a numb violent soldier, and then as he stumbles along the road to recovery.
One of the things that I found hardest to cope with in this book was that Ishmael and I are not very different in age. While I ran around toilet papering my friends houses, Beah dodged bullets in the forest had to hide in trees to survive. While I practiced homecoming skits or soccer drills, Beah watched hundreds of people get slaughtered. Even harder to imagine, Beah himself slaughtered. I finished this book with a restless desire to do something. This book gave me a new face for conflicts in Africa. It helped me to have a more vivid understanding of what the countless headlines at the bottom of news pages are referring to. The problem is, I have no clue what to do to fight problems like that. But this book sure left me with a desire to, at the very least, encourage others to read about the devastating affects that war can have on children.