Ishmael Beah, OC ’04, is currently on a nationwide tour to promote his new book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, which tells of his experiences as a 12-year-old soldier in his native Sierra Leone. After his village was destroyed and his family killed, Beah was captured and indoctrinated into the government army. At the age of 16 he was removed from the conflict by UNICEF and underwent years of rehabilitation before emigrating to the United States and eventually attending Oberlin, where he studied politics and creative writing. He is currently a member of Human Rights Watch Children’s Division Advisory Committee. A Long Way Gone debuted at number two on The New York Times Bestseller List and is being sold at Starbucks locations nationwide. Beah appeared at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cleveland on Thursday night.

When did you first get the idea to write the book?
It was at Oberlin when I started taking fiction classes. I was in a writing class with Professor Dan Chaon and I was trying to figure out how to put my story into words.

Did your experiences find their way into your fiction?
Yes. Actually that was sort of how I tested it out. I hadn’t told many people about my childhood because I didn’t want them to just think of me in a certain way. So I put it into fiction to see how people would react.

What role did your adoptive American mother play in your life?
She played an enormous role. First of all, she got me out of the conflict. For the first few months that I lived with her, she didn’t let me talk about what had happened to me. She just gave me a chance to rest and be myself and learn to use my intelligence for productive things. She also helped get me into high school at the United Nations International School.

Through your advocacy work you’ve undoubtedly come into contact with other former child soldiers from other conflicts around the world. Do you feel you share a common bond with them?
Well, of course every conflict has its own characteristics, but I think we share a common bond in that we’ve experienced violence firsthand and we know what that’s like and also what it’s like to live after it and not have to wake up every morning listening to guns and bombs. So yes, we share that.

You’ve mentioned that the international media only seems to report on Africa when there’s a disaster to write about. What are some of the stories that you feel are being missed?
For instance, in Sierra Leone, the government corruption that led to the civil war is still there, but nobody is writing about it because there’s no war right now. That story is being completely missed. It’s unfortunate that a lot of people’s first introduction to Sierra Leone is when they read about limbs being cut off because there’s so much more going on there. For instance, there are people that I fought with in the war who are now going to medical school and creating lives for themselves, but that doesn’t get written about. It’s not what they call “hot news,” I guess.

Right now, advocacy around this issue seems to dominate your life. Do you ever wish you could do something else?
I hope to use my voice to help children affected by war for as long as I am able. I feel very strongly about this issue and I’m going to do all I can to try to change things. This is not a profession for me. Eventually, though, I may do other things.

What do you have to say to students at Oberlin now?
I think that at Oberlin, people are very sheltered and like to think of the world in this liberal way. So I would tell people that they should be willing to work with people who may not see the world the way they do or have a different point of view. I’ve learned that you can chastise people you don’t agree with or you can find a way to work with them.