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Brief Summary Of The Book 'A Long Way Gone'

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A Long Way Gone The book I picked is “A long way gone”. It relates the experience of a child soldier from Sierra Leone, which is a country located in Southern Africa, between Guinea and Liberia, next to the North Atlantic Ocean. This former British colony has currently six million inhabitants, and gained independence in 1961. The official language of Sierra Leone is English, but only 30% of its citizens are educated. Besides that the average life expectancy is 40 years and AIDS / HIV affects 7% of the population; and the economic and social infrastructure of Sierra Leone are not well developed. In addition, nearly two-thirds of the population survives on subsistence agriculture, although the extraction of alluvial diamonds represents almost half the country's exports and the most important source of foreign exchange earnings. The first diamonds from Sierra Leone were discovered in 1930. In addition to diamonds, the country has many natural resources of titanium ore, bauxite, iron ore, gold and iron chromite. Today, Sierra Leone is in peace, and exports approximately $142 million worth of diamonds annually. Between 1991 and 2002, Sierra Leone has gone through a violent civil …show more content…

Members of a micro-cultural group such as child soldiers possess some physical and cultural trait that distinguishes them from others such as being a child and being more violent than usual for example. At the beginning of the book, villagers even though they were child soldiers because they are kids and wandering.This shows that micro-cultural group such as rebels have specific cultural and physical trait. However in that case, since the power is detained by the army and the rebel groups, they are the ones that represent the macro-cultural

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