The boy soldier and the teenager

I recently had the opportunity to read A long way gone: Memoirs of a boy soldier by Ishmael Beah. It's an amazing, thought-provoking, tragic, and at times gruesome, story of Beah's time as a child soldier in Sierra Leone.

I won't go into how awesome the book is - you should really check it out for yourself. What I will talk about is the reaction of one of my students to the book.


I tutor a few kids a week in English and one of them is reading a novel about child soldiers in Uganda. I started to tell him about Beah's book and he begged me to read him a description from the book. He wanted me to find the goriest part and read it (I didn't). He thought it was so cool (and so do his friends from class) that kids in other countries actually get to use guns and kill people.

Needless to say, I stopped reading pretty quickly. I'm still not really sure as to how to react. I'm disturbed that he couldn't relate to this being real and not fiction.

I'm contemplating having him read Beah's book once he's finished the novel, to give him some perspective and do a mini research project on the Lord's Resistance Army. Maybe then he won't be so quick to wish we were at war so he could fight.

Be true to yourself ...about yourself

I recently finished Kathy Pike's book Hope... from the Heart of Horses and found one part in the book in particular caught my attention and held it:

"A human who is in an incongruent state of being - thinking one thought while feeling a different emotion, or carrying an agenda and trying to hide it - gives off the same vibration or stress signals as a predatory animal in the wild. ...Horses couldn't care less what you are trying to appear to be; horses sense what you are feeling, who you are, even if you are unaware of it yourself." (p 49)

It's true. A horse won't care what your agenda is or who it is you're pretending to be - they only care about the true self. That's what makes horses so great to work with when it comes to therapy: you know pretty much immediately if someone is hiding something based on how the horse reacts to them.

Take my last group demonstration for example: I was having a bit of a crappy day and tried to fake it with my group. I wasn't able to get my demonstration done initially because Jamie, the Standardbred horse in the photo, was anxious and a bit fidgety, sensing my emotions. After taking a minute to sort out my feelings and show Jamie that everything was okay, he responded well and did everything I asked him to do.

I guess I, and pretty much everyone else out there, need to take a minute and remember that you can't lie to a horse so you might as well be honest with everyone in the first place.