Ishmael Beah

I saw somebody sitting on the veranda, and I recognized from afar that this was my grandmother.

She was looking somewhere else, lost in her thoughts, and as I got closer, she raised her head and she saw me.

And she stood up, as strong as she had been when she attacked those bushes, and she began to wept as I came closer.

She shook my hand, she held me closer to her, and she tried to pick me up.

But she couldn't do it.

And so she said to me, what has happened to you?

How come you've gotten so heavy?

And she looked at my height, and she looked at my face, and I said, Grandma, it's been many, many years.

So I'm an adult now.

The last time my grandmother saw me, I was 12 years old, so she was still thinking of me in that way.

So we sat down to talk, but she tried again to see if she could pick me up, and she couldn't do it.

So we sat on the veranda, and we started to talk about what had happened during the war.

So I asked her, how did you survive this madness that was difficult for even a young person to survive, let's just say an older person?

She looked at me and said, first of all, I am not old.

And secondly, what happened was that when the war came to my village, I ran to my farm because I knew that there I would be able to have access to food and stay there for a little bit until I decided what to do.

But I knew eventually people would come to the farm looking for food and it would be people with weapons.

So she left that place and began going to towns and villages that she knew all these pathways, the waterways, and she would get into Okinawa and part Okinawa after Okinawa.

Weeks after weeks, she would walk in swamps.

She slept standing in swamps and made her way to this island called Bund, which was one of the places in the country that the war didn't reach.

It was very difficult to get to.