Book Summary: Blood Diamonds

Bloods Diamonds was a rollercoaster book in which there were times you felt the excitement and other parts of the book it was more factual making it a bit dry. One of the attention-grabbing moments for me was in chapter four when the author speaks about the usage of mules to transport and deliver the units of diamonds to the Liberian border. I never would have imaged that people will literally walk for over two hours back in forth to deliver diamonds to another country! The would supply the Liberians with the diamonds in return the Revolutionary United Front will be supplied with guns. The massacre that occurred in March 25, 1997 deeply grieved my heart when Revolutionary United Forces and the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council massacred people

I was a bit surprised of the difficulties that Campbell experience to gain access to visit a diamond mining area. The author had to go the extent of pretending to be government contractors in order to enter the area. The description of the workers in the mining areas to find diamonds created a picture in my head of slaves working in cotton fields. The workers were forced to work from sunrise to sunset with no breaks and there only form of payment was two cups of rice and wage that corresponds to fifty cents (U.S dollar). I content that the other briefly described the process of how the worker looked for diamonds because I had no prior knowledge of how to extract a diamond. A noteworthy observation Campbell gathered was that there was no main difference between a government owned mine and a mine controlled by rebels other than the lack of guns. I would think if a government owned mine would take the necessary actions to instill proper working conditions for the miners. Unfortunately, this revealed to me the lack of governmental power and its care for the citizens of their country. Throughout reading Blood Diamonds it makes you question is the cost of materialistic items worth more than rights of