Growing Up Too Fast

Ishmeal Beah is a man in a child’s body but is still a child at heart. Ishmeal have unfortunately have had to go through horrors that many people have never experienced and probably never will. These horrors made the decision for him and whether or not he was going to grow up to fast. “After all the trouble and risk we undertook to get the money, it became useless. We would have been less hungry if we had stayed at the village instead of walking the miles to Mattru Jong and back. I wanted to blame someone for this particular predicament, but there was no one to be blamed. We had made a logical decision and it had come to this. It was a typical aspect of being in the war. Things changed rapidly in a matter of seconds and no one had any control over anything. We had yet to learn these things and implement survival tactics, which was what it came down to, (Beah 29)” A child would have come up with a million different people or things to blame this predicament on. But Ishmeal, at the age of twelve, realized something that some people don’t realize until it’s almost too late, that sometime there is no to blame but yourself. He also realized that war it’s just sticks and stones as some people think it is. It is a forever changing thing that no one can predict a single thing about. However Ishmeal still contains the heart of a child, because everyone has it somewhere deep inside them, it’s just buried away; like Ishmeal’s. He still wants to be a child; he wants to blame someone for his life being changed beyond recognition. Just like a child would, he wants everything to go back to the way it was and that he can still believe that the war will never affect his life. But it can’