Ishmael Beah: Inspiration to Everyone

Ohio University has a great program that brings influential speakers to the campus and presents these people to the students and people in the community, sometimes free of charge. Tonight's speaker, was on a whole other level.

Ishmael Beah is 28 years old and has already experienced more horror, destruction and overall madness than most people experience in their lifetime. He is a former child soldier from Sierra Leone during the Civil War that erupted in the early 1990's. At just 11 years old, he was thrust from his home, had his parents and brother ripped away from him forever, and was brainwashed with drugs and violent training to become a child killing machine. 

While I won't relay his entire life story, it's hard for me to accept that such horrid things happen in the world. It is apparent to me that I am living in amazing conditions, with amazing people in my life. Yet, I am guilty of taking this for granted on a daily basis. What struck me most about Ishmael, was his current appreciation for the small things.

He told us a story of how he once found it funny to see his classmates (in New York after he had been rescued from Sierra Leone) complain about not having the best and the coolest gadgets out on the market. When they asked him what he was laughing about, he didn't give them an answer. What he confided to us, was that he found it funny to complain about something material like that, when he had nearly lost his life on a daily basis.

This was just one small story in the hour and half presentation he gave. While there were no pictures, no videos, and no sound clips, the way he used his words and the way he illustrated his experience with us gave just as much of a view into his past than a video would have done. 

I can't even begin to touch on the horror he described and the intensity in which he lived over those war years, and I plan on reading his memoirs, "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier" and I encourage everyone else to do so as well. If it covers even a small bit of his past, it will open as many inspirations in you as it did in me. 

This is his website, and I hope that his story spreads even more than it already has.

http://www.alongwaygone.com/

  It is definitely a story that needs to be heard.