All Strangers Are Enemies

  Beah writes, “This was one of the consequences of the civil war. People stopped trusting each other, and every stranger became an enemy”(Pg. 37, A Long Way Gone).  
I tried to think of a time when I experienced this feeling. My mind lead me back to a time when I was much younger. My mother used to force me to go to a Korean Saturday School, this way I could learn the language and learn a little about my heritage. I am half Korean and when I showed up I stuck out like a sore thumb among all the “100%” Koreans. They had all been raised in households less Americanized than mine and many of them could already speak the language quite well. I felt very left out and very excluded, nobody talked to me and frankly I didn’t really want to talk to them. They scared me and I had my mind made up that I didn’t like them. I had this feeling that they were all my enemies. I felt like I didn’t fit in, and they didn’t like me, and all I wanted to do was leave. Now that I look back this seems very immature of me and I wish I would have tried to make friends. But, I can sympathize with my 10 year old self and understand how feeling that I was different could cause me to react in this way. 
The case that Ishmael speaks of is very different than mine. It is a similar feeling but on a different more serious level. There are times in “A Long Way Gone” where we see this behavior. When the boys sneak back into Mattru Jong to find money for food, a situation like this occurs. “At one point, as soon as we had crossed the road, we heard footsteps. There was no immediate cover, so we had to swiftly run onto a verandah and hide behind stacks of cement bricks”(pg. 27, A Long Way Gone). The boys have no clue who might be approaching, but they scramble for cover assuming that whoever it is, is a threat and an enemy. There is no trust among people here. All strangers are enemies.