Bring It On Home

Genocide, car bombs, boy soldiers, child prostitution—frightening headlines from distant places. Closer to home—school shootings, illegal immigrants, threats of bioterrorism. The world can seem incomprehensibly enormous and threatening, especially to the awakening teenage mind.

But by using stories, we can help teens grasp the hard realities of their world. Through the skillful use of narrative, an international crisis can be transformed into a local, even intimate, plight and personal turning point, and enhance student awareness and understanding.

As fiction or memoir, story puts us behind the eyes of another person. We feel what they feel, see what they see. We may be the victim, sold into sexual slavery in India; we may be the eyewitness, our mother dying of AIDS in an African village; we may be the perpetrator, pulling the trigger on classmates. But we are there, and we understand in a way unmatched by simply hearing the news.

Through dialogue, detail, characterization, and viewpoint, story brings the world home to us, and recent young adult books featuring young protagonists are especially apt for teens in this respect. Multicultural and multidisciplinary units of study will be enriched and enlivened by incorporating story into classroom discussion, creative writing, group and independent research, and outside reading.

“[S]uddenly the horror had a face,” writes Hanna Jansen in Over a Thousand Hills I Walk with You (Carolrhoda, 2006), a novel based on the true story of her adopted Tutsi daughter Jeanne, the lone survivor of her family’s massacre in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Jeanne, eight, has overheard talk of uprisings and sensed her parents’ growing fears, but when local Hutu rebellion breaks out, the rumors suddenly wear faces she knows.

Her world shifts violently when her family is slain before her eyes, leaving her angry and bewildered. Succinct details evoke her village life in a vivid African setting and her wandering refugee days amid constant threat and desolation. Jansen weaves in poignant chapters portraying Jeanne’s life with her adoptive family where she works through her tragic memories in a secure and loving environment. Over a Thousand Hills puts Jeanne’s face on the horror of genocide, inviting comparison to other Holocaust literature.

Moving to the Middle East, the narrative point of view alternates tensely among numerous characters affected by a suicide bombing outside Jerusalem in Pnina Moed Kass’s Real Time (Clarion, 2004). The lives of a German teen seeking guilty secrets from his family’s past, a young kibbutz worker from Russia, a Holocaust survivor haunted by secrets of his own, and a naive Palestinian teen promised eternal glory violently collide on an exploding bus. Kass swirls a tumbling kaleidoscope of intersecting stories, narrated minute by minute by complex, conflicted characters.

Real Time explores the hopes and humanity of the differing factions in the volatile Middle East without blinking at the deadly chaos that erupts with little warning, offering springboards for further discussion and study of the region. Use Real Time’s format as a template to explore converging viewpoints in creative writing or group improvisation.

Alberto and Sonny are also caught in a war, this one run by Colombian drug cartels in Matt Whyman’s Boy Kills Man (HarperCollins, 2005). Twelve-year-old dropouts living in the slums of Medellín, enthralled by soccer and machismo, are recruited by drug lord El Fantasma as assassins. “Believe me, nothing is more unsettling in this world than a kid with a gun,” he says of them.

The power and money that come with the gun inevitably spiral into graphic violence and personal disaster in a heartbreaking, gritty look at the international drug trade. This provocative, disturbing story of young lives that tragically dead-end will enrich the study of contemporary South America, drug-abuse education, and the role of guns in different cultures.

Guns hold little appeal for Gray Wilton, despite his father’s browbeating him to take up hunting and be a man, in Nancy Garden’s Endgame (Harcourt, 2006). “Gonna be better, gonna be better here,” he tells himself, hoping to leave behind the harassment he suffered in middle school, but at his new school in a new town in Connecticut, the unavoidable bullies target him as an easy, undersized mark for their unrelenting torture.

Harassed at home by his domineering father and increasingly isolated socially, Gray loses his drums, dog, and only friend before showing up at school with a loaded semiautomatic and a burning desire for revenge. Chilling in its eyes-wide-open look at the cruelty of bullying and emotional violence, Endgame is useful for personal and group counseling on coercion and intimidation, as well as consideration of literary character development.

Sometimes young people find themselves facing betrayal and desperation through no choice of their own. Patricia McCormick’s Sold (Hyperion, 2006) portrays 13-year-old Lakshmi, a Nepali girl sold into prostitution in Calcutta by her gambling addicted stepfather. Sold is written in extraordinary, stark free verse (“Before it starts,/you hear a zipper baring its teeth”) which lays out the grim realities of Lakshmi’s life without sensationalizing.

Beaten and starved, drugged and raped, Lakshmi’s experiences are based on the author’s interviews with sex slaves in India and Nepal. McCormick deftly explores the tangled relationships among the young girls, the men who use them, and their brutal owners. She weaves hope into the story through Lakshmi’s friendship with the young son of another prostitute, and her eventual rescue by an American. After reading Sold, students can research anti-trafficking Web sites and organizations. Discuss the power of poetry in telling Lakshmi’s tragic story.

Hope also runs alongside despair in Deborah Ellis’s Our Stories, Our Songs: African Children Talk about AIDS (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2005), a compilation of poignant interviews with children touched by AIDs in sub-Saharan Africa, where the disease has orphaned 11.5 million. The simply written first-person vignettes tell of poverty, life on the streets, loss of parents and dreams, personal infection with HIV, fears and hopes, with sepia-toned photographs of the speakers putting actual faces on an overwhelming tragedy. Despite their difficult, even desperate circumstances, the children speak with dignity, courage, and hope of their daily lives and future plans, several wanting to help effect true change in the world. Sidebars feature facts about AIDS, making this a valuable resource for health and social studies classes. Like Sold, this is a call-to-action book which can spur research into practical ways in which U.S. students can make a difference in Africa’s AIDS crisis.

In Marina Budhos’s Ask Me No Questions (Atheneum, 2006), Nadira and her family are illegal aliens from Bangladesh. After living in the United States on expired visas for years with no trouble, immigration regulations suddenly tighten after 9/11, and the family tries to flee the country. Their father is arrested and detained at the Canadian border, sending Nadira and her sister Aisha back to Queens to live as if nothing has happened. They struggle with the imposed invisibility of their life.

Aisha tells her classmates in her valedictory address, “All I ask of you is to see me for who I am…I live near you. I go to your school; I eat in your cafeteria; I take the same classes…I want what you want. I want a future.”

The sisters compile documentation that convinces the judge they are not terrorists, freeing their father. Budhos’s story demonstrates the diversity within the American Muslim community as well as the particular complications of relationship within a first-generation immigrant family. Ask Me No Questions can be mined for takeoff points on prejudice, the value of citizenship, and the place in the U.S. economy of “invisible people” willing to do menial jobs.

Most of the teen immigrants featured in the story collection First Crossing: Stories about Teen Immigrants (Candlewick, 2004), edited by Donald R. Gallo, are legal, hailing from diverse points including Cambodia, Haiti, Kazakhstan, Korea, Mexico, Venezuela, China, and even Transylvania. An engaging counterpoint to the throngs who streamed through Ellis Island, First Crossing includes young people who are uprooted from their native countries by violence, business and family ambition, economic straits, and adoption. Poignant drama and wry humor are laced through these stories that will let U.S. teens see their own culture through fresh eyes. Send students out to interview immigrants in their own community and families.

As-yet-theoretical crises show up in the headlines, too—nuclear war, pandemic disease. In Caroline B. Cooney’s Code Orange (Delacorte, 2005), Mitty Blake, a Manhattan high school student, stumbles across century-old smallpox scabs in an old medical book, and worries he has contracted the virus. A vigilante terrorist group picks up on his clumsy Internet research on the disease and kidnaps him to use as a human biological weapon.

Deftly ironic humor and a winsome protagonist balance the tense action in an accessible story that will enliven middle-grade discussions of bacteriology, bioterrorism, or even bird flu. Students can spin off their own stories of suspense prompted by the “what if” of the return of a “conquered” disease. Code Orange would be an engaging read-aloud for middle-school science classes.

Whether foreboding possibilities or current crises in another hemisphere or our own backyard, the bewildering tragedies in the headlines happen to individual people. Creative classroom use of memoir, fiction, and biography distills complicated world issues down to personal stories fostering students’ empathy and compassion. Through the unique strengths of young adult books, teens can gain a global perspective that embraces an immense, often violent world, and learn to see its many faces as not so different from those they see at home, sharing the indomitable human spirit.