Saroo loves playing in the water but cannot swim. ![]() He has difficulty communicating with anyone and has to scavenge, steal and beg for food. After children in the station begin being kidnapped and a train almost hits Saroo, he decides to take to the streets of Calcutta. Saroo begins to sleep at the end of a train platform with other orphaned children. ![]() For days he sneaks aboard random trains, but they always return to the same station in Calcutta. He receives little help and is too distrustful of the police to ask them for help. He does not speak well, cannot read and does not know the name or location of his hometown. He speaks Hindi, not Bengali, which is the main language in Calcutta. Much later, the carriage doors open, and Saroo enters Calcutta. When he awakes, the carriage doors are closed, the train is moving, and he is trapped. He thinks that Guddu will find him and falls asleep again. He boards the train and realizes that no one is in the carriage. He is worried that the train will pull out, and he will be left alone. Confused, Saroo wonders if Guddu is on the train. Saroo falls asleep and awakes to see a train in front of him. ![]() Saroo is told to wait on a bench as Guddu scavenges for food and coins around the train platform. They sneak aboard a train near their home and exit onto a station in a place Saroo calls Berampur. When he is 5, Saroo convinces his older brother Guddu to take him to the train station. He steals food with his brothers and cares for his sister. Saroo’s mother struggles to earn enough to feed and shelter her four children, so they are almost always hungry. When Saroo’s father leaves his mother, money is scarce. After his uncle's death, Ishmael flees Sierra Leone for neighboring Guinea and eventually makes his way to his new life in the United States.Saroo was born in India to a Hindu mother and a Muslim father. He meets Laura Simms, a storyteller and his future foster mom, and sees the importance of sharing his experience with the world in hopes of preventing such horrors from happening to other children.Īfter Ishmael returns to Freetown, Sierra Leone, a coup by the RUF and the military ousts the civilian government, and the war Ishmael has been avoiding catches up with him. ![]() He learns that others like him have suffered and survived. Ishmael is invited along with other children of war to New York City to tell his story to the United Nations. Ishmael is welcomed by his extended family in Freetown and is again saved by their support and kindness. The love and compassion he finds at the center from a nurse named Esther opens up an understanding and forgiveness within himself. Ishmael is taken to a rehabilitation center, where he struggles to understand his past and to imagine a future. Ishmael continues to soldier fiercely until his Lieutenant turns the boy soldiers over to UNICEF. The boy soldiers become addicted to cocaine, marijuana, and "brown brown," which give them the courage to fight and the ability to repress their emotions in times of war. The army becomes his family and he is brainwashed into believing that each rebel death may avenge his own family's slaughter. Their day-to-day existence is a struggle of survival, and the boys find themselves committing acts they would never have believed themselves capable of, such as stealing food from children.Įventually, Ishmael is conscripted as a soldier by the army and he becomes the very thing he feared: a killing machine capable of horrible violence. Among the confusion, violence, and uncertainty of the war, Ishmael, his brother, and his friends wander from village to village in search of food and shelter. When he is twelve years old, Beah's village is attacked while he is away performing in a rap group with friends. A Long Way Gone is the true story of Ishmael Beah, who becomes an unwilling boy soldier during a civil war in Sierra Leone.
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