Ishmael Beah

Eventually, I found out that my brothers, my two brothers, and my immediate family, my two brothers and my mother, were killed in the war.

And so it happened to so many other people in Sierra Leone.

During this war also, children were being sought after and recruited to fight as soldiers.

And at that time, these children were forced to inflict violence upon their elders.

In my community, you couldn't speak back to somebody who was older than you.

But the war used this as a way to terrorize the structures that had existed.

So all through this time when I was running from the war, I kept thinking about my grandmother, whether she had survived because she was an elder.

Eventually, I was recruited to fight as one of those children that was used as a soldier to fight in this war.

I came out of that war luckily for me alive, and I thought about my grandmother.

I spent 10 years going back home to Kabati, to Sierra Leone, looking for my grandmother constantly.

But each time I would have leads and I would follow them and they would come to a dead end and I would lose her.

I didn't know whether it was something within me.

I always believed that my grandmother survived.

That if anybody could survive, she was the one who did it because of how she was before the war.

I'd been going around back and forth every now and then.

Then one day,

I was back in Sierra Leone, in my country, and I went to the village and someone told me that my grandmother had returned.

I didn't want to believe it because I'd done this so many times.

Nonetheless, I began to walk back to the house that I knew my grandmother had lived.

When I began to approach it,