Epic journey ends in peace

He used to be a boy soldier, a 13-year-old who learned to slit a man's throat without flinching. He was one of hundreds of thousands of children, hopped up on drugs, killing without remorse, fighting grown-up wars.

The power of Ishmael Beah's story, though, isn't just what he was forced to do but how he learned to undo it. He chronicles these transformations in his book, "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier." If you are a latte drinker perhaps you have seen the book for sale at Starbucks, where it is the current reading selection. The book also sits near the top of the New York Times best-seller list.

Beah, now 26, grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small town without electricity or running water. Before the war, on summer nights and during the rainy season, he says, he and his friends would spend hours listening to grown-ups tell stories — folk tales that linked the children to their ancestors and taught them how to be good.

Laura Simms also grew up hearing stories, although these were mostly ones passed down by her Eastern European Jewish family in Brooklyn. As an adult she became a professional storyteller, and in 1998, two years after meeting Beah in New York at the United Nations' "First International Children's Parliament," she unofficially adopted him.

This week, mother and son will be in Salt Lake City to talk about how stories can heal. Although Beah has been touring the country to talk about his book, and Simms is always on the road telling stories, this is the first time they will take the stage together. Their presentation, as well as other events featuring Beah and Simms separately, is sponsored in part by the Center for Documentary Arts at The Leonardo. Simms, a consultant for the CDA's Center for the Story, "awakens us to the stories we live in," says CDA executive director Les Kelen.

You might call Beah's story an epic, Simms says; the kind of story in which the protagonist "goes out into the world and suffers a great deal, and brings back a wisdom that has been forgotten or lost." In an epic, she says, the hero may encounter a monster, "or some immense unkindness."

Ishmael Beah's epic began on an ordinary January day in 1993, when he left home with his older brother and a few friends to walk 16 miles to a talent show in Mattru Jong.

At 7, Ishmael used to recite Shakespeare for his neighbors. At 12, on visits to the recreation center run by the mining company where his father worked — a half-hour's walk away but it might as well have been a different planet — he saw his first rap music video. He was entranced by all those English words spoken so fast, and before long he and his friends had started their own rap and dance troupe.