When he was 15, UNICEF workers rounded up some of the child soldiers and sent them to a "rehabilitation center" near the Sierra Leonean capital. It was here that Beah came down off the drugs and eventually came face to face with what he had witnessed and what he had done. It is a testament to the patience of the nurses and other workers that he eventually learned to trust people again, and to regain both his childhood and his humanity.

To "live well with the memory," rather than to forget, allows the memory to teach rather than be a burden, he says. To tell the story of what happened, he hopes, will remind people that war is not romantic, that violence is always the wrong choice, and that a traumatized child can recover.

"I have been rehabilitated now, so don't be afraid of me," he told the U.N. Economic and Social Council in 1996, when he was 15. "I am not a soldier anymore; I am a child."

After moving to New York to live with Laura Simms, Beah attended high school and then went on to graduate from Oberlin College in Ohio. He currently advises the Children's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, and is creating a foundation to provide educational opportunities for young people in Sierra Leone. Of Simms he says: "She is my mother and I love her dearly."

As a storyteller, Simms has used scary fairy tales to help New York children process the horrors of 9/11. She has taught people to find the story in their own lives: to give structure and meaning to details that may seem at first to not add up to anything.

Some people, says Simms, live their lives stuck in one story, and sometimes the story we tell about ourselves is just a veneer. "But at some point we begin to listen to a much deeper, authentic story that doesn't reject anything." This is when we can heal, she says.

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E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com