A Long way home Reading and reflection 3

“Someone came on the radio and announced himself as the new president of Sierra Leone. His name, he said, was Johnny Paul Koroma, as he was the leader Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), which had been formed by a group of Sierra Leone Army (SLA) officers to overthrow the democratically elected President Tejan Kabbah. Koroma’s English was as bad as the reason he gave for the coup. He advised everyone to go to work by saying that everything was in order. In the background of his speech, gunshots and angry soldiers cursing and jubilating almost drowned him out.”
I chose this paragraph to write about because to me reading this third part of the book it seem that every time there is some sort of normality of chance for hope of living a normal life or I guess as normal as possible of a life Ishmael faces a tragic rude awaking of the horrors that haunts his home country. I could not believe it as I was reading of the rebels and the Army over taking the current government sending what was a healing country back into a society of violence. I could only imagine the confusion he must have been feeling as he wrote about himself asking the questions “why does this keep happening to me?” It really seems horribly ironic as this seemed to have happened so many times before and after all he had been through to have to face this fear again. This time had to be worse than the last, with the fear of rejoining the army and returning to that life that still haunted his nightmares. I can’t relate in any way to this type of feeling or the idea of being faced with such life changing traumatic situation so many times in one’s life like Ishmael faced. I can only imagine and hope that one day these regions of the world can experience peace and freedom away from the fears they face today.

A Long Way Home Post #2

Chapter 11 Pg 95
“My entire body went into shock. Only my eyes moved, slowly opening and closing. I tried to shake my legs to get the blood flowing, but I fell to the ground, holding my face. On the ground I felt as if my eyes were growing too big for their sockets. I could feel them expanding, and the pain released my body from the shock. I ran towards the house. Without any fear I went inside and looked around the smoke filled rooms. The floor was filled with heaps of ashes; no solid form of a body was inside. I screamed at the top of my lungs and began to cry as loudly as I could, punching and kicking with all my might into the weak walls that continued to burn”
                This stood out to me from the book because of the sheer emotion I felt when I read it. Up to this point of the book there was little to no hope for Ishmael but with recent news he finds that his family is alive and barely holding back he hurries to find them, only to find that the rebels had just attacked the city and no one was left alive. As he moves towards the hut where his family once lived he loses all control and what little hope existed is now gone and his emotion in this moment was so strong because of all that has happen to this point to have his family yet again taken from him because of the rebels is heart breaking. In my own life I have never been in a situation where I have ever come close to losing my family and certainly not in a circumstance such as this. I cannot imagine how Ishmael must have felt having gone threw it twice.