How does a child recover after witnessing their family and friends being mutilated and slaughtered? How does a child bounce back from going days without food and shelter while simultaneously running away from men with guns, who want to exploit them? How does an eight-year-old boy or a 10-year-old girl cope after being captured by extreme militant groups?

...(tonight)... the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies at Dalhousie University will be hosting three guests who know first hand what it is like to trade in their childhoods for AK-47s.

 

Ishamael Beah, best-selling author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, will be among the guests. Mr. Beah was captured at the age of 13 and was forced to serve as a child soldier for the government army of Sierra Leone. 

 

The Centre for Foreign Policy will also welcome Grace Akallo, the author of Girl Soldier: A Story of Hope for Northern Uganda’s Children, a chilling autobiographical account of her experience as a child soldier at the age of 15.

 

John Kon Kelei, a former child soldier from Sudan, will be a guest as well. Mr. Kelei is a spokesperson for War Child Holland and a postgraduate student of International and European Law in the Netherlands.