Chapter Four: 4. In this chapter and the next, the boys steal food because they are starving. We usually consider this “acceptable” theft, but the boys stole from other people who didn’t have much food either. How do you judge what they did?

It is problematic for us, in the first world, to judge over anything that Beah goes through in Sierra Leone. We simply have little to no context about what these children were going through. It is certainly unfortunate that the boys steal from others who have so little but few of us have been literally starving in a war ravaged region at such a tender age. Our Western social and ethical norms do not translate very well to violent and impoverished situations like Beah experienced.