Ishmael Beah talks at UNCG

Ishmael Beah, the author of a A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier spoke at UNCG on Oct 3, 2008

He read a passage from his book - about the day he realized war had begun and the world changed. He talked about his exasperation when he realized that this terrible violence was occurring and many people in the world did not even know where the country of Sierra Leone was ( his perspective several years later, in New York where he lived when he left Africa) People should know, should educate themselves and others about what is happening there and elsewhere. This was the thread I saw throughout his talk and the questions afterwards.

Musee des Beaux Arts W.H. Auden 1940

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Fall of Icarus Pieter Breughel