“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.
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