Learning about the really hard things
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| Kathleen Martin (right) addresses students at St. Bede Academy Thursday following an all-school presentation. Martin, who graduated from St. Bede in 1991, returned to tell the students about her work on a book about the child soldiers used during the Sierra Leone Civil War, which ran from 1991-2002. (BCR photo/Barb Kromphardt) |
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PERU — Nineteen Octobers ago, Kathleen Martin walked the halls of St. Bede Academy as a senior, soon to graduate.
Thursday, she was back again, but this time Martin was there to teach others.
Martin, formerly of Spring Valley, is a journalist in Nova Scotia and is currently working on a book for young people about children in Sierra Leone.
Martin was asked to go to Sierra Leone, located in West Africa, by World Hope International-Canada, to research a book on child poverty. While there, she learned more about the civil war, which lasted from 1991 to 2002 and killed up to 100,000 people.
Martin said the war, which was portrayed in the movie “Blood Diamond,” began when she graduated from St. Bede.
“While I was in college and getting married and finding jobs, doing all those exciting things, other people were being killed in terrible ways,” she said.
One of the things that made the conflict so terrible was the use of child soldiers by both sides.
“They would take them from their homes, killing their families and saying basically, ‘You are our children now,’ and giving them AK-47s,” she said.
The children would be drugged on mixes of cocaine and gunpowder, and sent out to do unimaginable things, including the amputations of hands as a terror tactic.
“Basically what you have is the worst perversion of childhood you could imagine, which are kids used as weapons to kill other people,” Martin said.
On Thursday, Martin spoke of her experiences at an all-school assembly, and then spoke with smaller groups throughout the day.
While Martin wanted to share the story of the child soldiers, she had more she wanted to accomplish, and it had little to do with the children in Africa.
“It’s always nice to raise money for good causes, but it’s more than that,” she said. “It has to be a change of how you perceive your world.”
Martin said American teens need active and engaged minds to become aware of the problems around the world and to be able to empathize with other people in order to help solve the world’s problems.
“We have won the only lottery that matters in that we were born in this country,” she said. “We need to learn as much as we can, so that we can help in these situations.”
Martin also urged the students to talk to older people — “It’s really important that we continue to find out all the richness they have to offer” — and to go to class.
“It’s the most important thing,” she said. “Go to school, go to every class and do your work, and do it well.”
Martin told the students they have a responsibility to do those things even when they don’t want to.
“I said, ‘Think about that boy in Columbia right now that even as I speak to you is carrying an AK-47 and sitting on a rock, ready to do whatever he’s told to do, or the girl who’s being raped, and that’s happening right now,’” Martin said. “I said, ‘That’s hard. Doing algebra’s not hard, but it’s really important.’”
Martin said these things are important because they’re things the students can do now.
“It’s difficult when you’re talking about world issues, really big world issues, with kids because their power is limited,” she said. “But I said, ‘You can prepare yourself to be the kind of citizen that will make decisions that change how your government works, or insist that your government doesn’t not care about that kid because there’s no oil there.’”
Martin said teens can become overwhelmed with the world’s problems, and she tries to give them things that are doable.
“Be becoming a kid that does their work and practices at trying hard all the time, even when they don’t want to, you become a different kind of adult,” she said. “They have to see that how we act here is connected to what happens there.”
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