Sara Strawn
Yousafzai
April 26, 2015
Language Arts
Grotesque Parodies
When we think of children playing soldiers we seldom think they kill too, we don't think that they have the ability to take a life to kill another child or adult, but this is happening in Sudan, everyday child soldiers who can not yet read or write but can shoot their target from 50 feet away. Today, an estimated three hundred thousand children under age eighteen are participating in armed conflicts worldwide. Thousands more face recruitment or are members of armed forces and groups not presently at war. The life of a child soldier is filled with terror, violence, horrible living conditions, lack of proper sanitization and poor nutrition. Although being a soldier at first
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He was recruited for the LRA when he was just twelve years old (now is in his late twenties), and served for two years with other child soldiers. Norman said: the LRA’s recipe for making killers of children had three ingredients. First, they must abandon all hope of returning home. Next, they must be blooded by the act of a murder. Finally, through superstition and ritual, their new persona is inflated with its own sense of esteem. Supporting all this, though, there’s a final constant: rage. Rage at their own taking; at their beatings and starvation, at the atrocities they’re witnessing, at the crimes they’re now committing. More than anything else when recounting, Norman talks of his own possession, not by the spirits but by the furies. “Whenever I saw anything, it was not with a good heart. All my mind was full of destruction.” His head was swollen and bald from the heavy loads he’d had to carry on it. He had severe conjunctivitis. Upon finally returning home, his stomach was bloated with hunger. Norman’s own mother didn’t recognize him. He had to beg, “It’s me! Your son!” Before he was taken, Norman’s father remembers him as a respectful child who worked hard at school and “prayed a lot”. When he returned, he’d become someone else. He’d beat other children; at one point “kicking his sister almost