knowledge is power.

Earlier this week I was fortunate enough to go to a presentation by a man from Sierra Leon named Ishmael Beah, the author of "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier." Sierra Leon is located in West Africa and experienced a terrible civil war beginning in the mid-1990's. Ishmael was a child soldier for two years when he was 11 and 12. He spent an hour talking about his story ....

Ishmael lost his family during the war ... his mother, father, and two brothers were all killed within a two year period. He spent 45 minutes telling us about his life - pre-war, during the war, and post-war. He was a captivating speaker. I was absolutely mesmorized. He talked about violence. About death. About war. He talked about the evils that surround war, but most importantly he talked about why he wrote his book. He talked about why we need to speak out on important issues and why we need to stand up for what we believe in.

"When you destroy the facts of a story, you destroy its purpose. You need to have a purpose for telling a story. My purpose was to tell that [atrocities of war] were happening to human beings with same human tendencies as everyone else. We are all capable of losing our humanity."

He said that you can't ever give up hope and you have to give a human face to the experience of war. "Sierra Leone was never a hopeless country," Beah said. "Nothing can be done if you write something off as hopeless. Issues can be easily put off without human context - if you don't humanize an issue, people don't pay attention to it."

He also said you have to hold people accountable for their actions. Unless people are held accountable, they think that it is okay to do terrible things.

"I will never forget what happened, but you learn to live with it. You can find good things out of horror, and you can appreciate what it is just to wake up and be alive," Beah said.

I am so glad I decided to go to his presentation ... It is amazing to me how easily I get caught up in my "problems" and stress, without even considering how lucky I am to just be able to wake up in peace everyday.

After the presentation, my friends and I had to opportunity to meet Ishmael. My friend Claire asked him what we could to make a difference. He said that we had to humanize the situation, but it seems so hard to do that from so far away. We wanted to know what we could do to make a difference...

His answer was simple:

LEARN ... He told us to learn about the issues. To educate ourselves and to educate others. When I heard this, I realized how important education really is. It has the ability to humanize a terrible situation, to get people involved, and to truly make a difference.

When I hear about people like Ishamel it reenforces my desire to become a teacher. There is so much to learn about, so much to teach, and so much of a difference to be made. No doubt, it is not always easy, but it seems that it begins with the desire to get involved and the compassion to help others. I believe that if you truly want to make a difference, there is always a way to make it happen. I hope that one day I can make half the difference as those who have helped me in my journey. I hope that I can take a stand for the things I believe in. I hope to teach others how important education and knowledge really is ...

Like Ishmael told us as we were leaving ... Knowledge is Power.