Ishamel Beah Visits Parker

Author, human rights spokesperson and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Ishmael Beah met with students to talk about his life and how it has informed his work.

After students completed their reading of Night, Elie Wiesel's firsthand account of surviving Auschwitz and other camps during the Holocaust, 8th grade English teacher David Fuder wanted to further explore concepts of memory, bearing witness and ways humans deprive others of humanity. 

Beah’s memoir A Long Way Gone details his personal story of living through a civil war as a middle school-aged child, being recruited as a child soldier and then rehabilitated from the trauma. The parallels in these two texts gave Fuder and his students much to reflect upon, and he was eager to add another layer of learning to the experience.

Last year, Fuder learned that Beah and his wife were close with Parker’s Abdul-Aleem family. This year, mom Raven reminded Fuder of this connection and collaborated with him and other interested parents and guardians to bring Beah to Parker for students’ benefit.

In anticipation of Beah’s visit, Fuder and his students listened to Beah’s Moth Story Hour talk sharing his experiences adapting to life in the U.S. as a teenager, read excerpts from A Long Way Gone, surveyed his other the novels and formulated questions to pose during his visit.

Fuder shared, “I want my students to see the power that hope affords those who seek it and embrace it, and, through meeting Beah in person, they could have a deeper sense of the immediacy and power of a writer’s work in the world.”

At Parker, Beah first met with the 8th grade to share his story and his work and lead students in a writing activity. He then joined Alicia Abood’s Upper School World Literature classes to convey more on his life story and his process and facilitate workshops with older student writers. Beah spent much of his time in direct conversation with the students, listening to their numerous insightful, honest questions and responding in the same fashion. 

In debriefing with his students the following day, Fuder offered, “It was clear how much Ishmael resonated with them: his resilience and life’s work, his unwavering mindset of gratitude and the nuggets of wisdom he shared with them about language and writing. It’s moments like these that can sustain us (more than we might realize) through challenging times and remind us of the power of story to embrace our shared humanity.”

Enjoy photos from Beah’s visit here.