by
Narr1:
No detail of war is too gruesome for Ishmael Beah. Last week the former child soldier spoke to a packed audience in a Manhattan Starbucks as part of his national book tour.
Ax1:
On the veranda we saw an old man sitting in a chair as if asleep, there was a bullet hole in his forehead; and underneath the stoop lay the bodies of two men whose genitals, limps and hands had been chopped off by a machete that was on the ground next to their piled body parts. I vomited, but we had to continue on.
Narr2:
Beah's autobiography is filled with descriptions like this one. He recounts how children would sniff "brown-brown," a combination of cocaine and gunpowder, which was intended to excite them to commit gruesome, acts against their own neighbors.
Even when the war was over Beah's memories kept him up at night. He said he couldn't imagine ever being happy again. Neil Boothby is director of Columbia University's Program of Forced Migration and Health. He says no former soldier is ever truly free from their past.
Amb2: Cutting up meat for a dinner a chicken for example would create flashbacks. In one case a boy had witnessed his father being killed in a particular location under a tree and he had to travel that path in order to go to his field and that would create flashbacks so he took a different route.
Narr 3:
Boothby has studied former child soldiers in Mozambique. He says boy soldiers face three main challenges once the conflict ends. There's the psychological problems like depression and panic attacks. They're often rejected by their communities, And they have a hard time finding regular jobs.
Boothby says young girls have an even harder time reintegrating. They return to their villages an easy target of social stigma.
AX3:
They've been raped or have children or have had sex out of wedlock, they are shunned and they are not on the marriage path and in many, many places marriage is the economic way forward.
Narr4:
Many charity organizations are helping former fighters, but some actually avoid treating them.
Holly Ziemer (Zee-mer) is with the Minneapolis-based Center for Victims of Torture. They refuse to treat former soldiers at their American sites because they are agents of violence. But the Center views child soldiers still living in Africa differently.
AX4:
They're both victims, but they're also perpetrators of violence performing actions of inhuman rights abuses frequently.
They deserve care and rehabilitation.
Narr5: Back in Starbucks, Beah reads from another portion of his book where he and some friends hide from rebels.
AX5:
They carried guns behind their backs, they were escorting a group of young women who carried cooking pots, bags of rice, mortars and pestles, we watched them until they were out of sight and then we got moving again.
Narr6: Beah's may be one literary voice in New York but he tells a story shared by 300,000 thousand children around the world who have fight in wars. Tania Haas, Columbia Radio News.