Ishmael Beah

Sitting in the audience knowing you will soon be face to face with a national best selling author is an amazing experience. Seeing Ishmael with his black suit and crazy hair, I first thought "this is going to be a long night." Then everything changed, rather than reading the book page by page he talked about himself in funny, but serious ways. One of them was when he said "I remember talking to the man I use to play soccer with at the kids center, and if my team lost there would be a fight, but if we won there wouldn't be a fight. So I was talking to this man and brought up how we use to win a lot, when he told me that they use to let us win, because they didn't want another fight. Before this I thought I was an amazing soccer player, now I'm just like well I tried."
The village that Ishmael lived in was nothing compared to what we have today or twenty years ago. Ishmael said "If you want to take a bath you have to fetch the water, then make a fire, warm up the water on the fire, then you have a bath. This was very different from his first trip to New York were he was explaining how he was so amazed from the shower, and when he went back home to tell his uncle, his uncle said "There must be a guy on the other side of the wall heating water and putting it through the hole.
At the end of his speech had to be one of the most remember able sayings I will always remember. Ishmael said "I got through this with a fight, everyone has that in them, they just need to find it in themselves first." Ishmael is one of my idols after listening to his speech and I hope he does come back to "Ball State" soon.