Beah becomes a pile of clay into the army’s hands thanks to his plight in life; he lost his family, friends and village because of the war, strangers everywhere he goes mistrust him and he has no basic human needs like water to drink and food to eat. Beah is angry, vulnerable and exhausted. The first stage of vulnerably he feels is the lack of basic human needs. While roaming the county, there is very little food and water in abundance and this causes many problems for Beah and his friends. “We were hungry that it hurt to drink water and we felt cramps in our guts. It was as though something were eating the insides of our stomachs” (30) relates Beah about how hungry he and his friends were. He later on reveals as his journey wears …show more content…
While traveling with his companions as they tried to find shelter in a war-torn Sierra Leone, many of the citizens mistrusted them because “[s]ome had heard rumors about young boys being forced by rebels to kill their families and bur their villages…[t]his was one of the consequences of the civil war. People stopped trusting each other, and every stranger became an enemy” (37). Because of the constant mistrust of Beah and his friends, their life was constantly threatened during their journey while looking for a village to stay at. Often Beah and company “were surrounded by muscular men with machetes who almost killed [them] before they realized that [Beah and his companions] were just children running away from the war…[a]t crowded villages where [they] sometimes stopped to spend the night, the men stayed up to keep an eye on [them]” (57). By joining the army, it gave the civilians an actually reason to fear them as they were trained killers; Beah recounts when he begins to get rehabilitated from being a child solider it felt “infuriating to be told what do by [the] civilians [that ran the rehabilitation center]…[a] few days earlier, we decided whether they would live or die”