Word: uis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...UI: My senior year of high school, I read a Newsweek article about child soldiers in Sierra Leone. It was a new topic to me, and I wanted to find out more. So I sat down after reading the article and wrote a really short story, more like just a sketch of a really brutal and violent scene. I [thought], how can this little kid be killing people? It doesn't really make any sense to me, but I wanted to see if I could capture that. I put it aside for the next four or five years, until...
...UI: China was the only person I spoke to who was a former child soldier. Of course, I read her autobiography, which is called Child Soldier: Fighting for My Life. Then I read a lot of other autobiographies of child soldiers and people who had been through conflicts, and read all of these Amnesty International Human Rights Watch-UN reports on children in conflict and child combatants. I read child psychology textbooks, to look at development, and how violence affects development, and how children perceive death, and punishment and reward. Additionally, I talked with [my own] family members and other...
...UI: Agu, in essence, would probably be a composite of a number of different people and their experiences that I encountered while doing the research for the book. I guess that's in the basic sense. He's obviously much more than that. But that's where the genesis of his character is. This person might have been in Uganda and this person might have been in Sierra Leone, and this person might have been in Sri Lanka, and this person might have been in Cambodia, but I'm trying to put all of these experiences into one character that...
...UI: He's anywhere from 9 to 12. The landscape of the book is Nigeria, but the country is not Nigeria. The country is specifically unnamed. He's supposed to be from a West African country...
...UI: That's probably more for an expert to answer. A lot of the evidence and reports say that they're scarred permanently. I don't think you can go through something like this and just come out ready to work and ready to operate. One of the problems that the communities face is that sometimes the kids who are forced to fight are forced to commit atrocities against their own community members, to disconnect them from their communities, and make it impossible for them to go back. So they have nothing to do but fight, because they have nowhere...