SUNY's 'Common Read' Author

Urges Students To Help Others

By LIBBY CUDMORE • for AllOTSEGO.com

ONEONTA – Before he even knew he wanted to be a writer, Ishmael Baeh was learning the fundamentals of storytelling.

"My father and I would play a game where he would put me on his shoulders and he would play he was blind," he said.  "I had to tell him the world.  He would pretend to walk into the wall, into the fire, and I would have to explain those things to him."

Such play – and books like "Treasure Island," his favorite growing up – gave him the tools to write his memoir, "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs a Boy Soldier," this year's SUNY Oneonta "Common Read."

Baeh gave the Mills Distinguished Lecture this evening before a full house of students and community members, taking the stage with a smile.  "I'm always smiling," he said.  "I wake up and I'm smiling because I am alive, so I've already won that day."

Baeh was just 11 when the Sierra Leone Civil War started in 1991.  After his village Mogbwemo was attacked, he fled, wandering with other boys until he was taken in by the military, who used him as a child soldier.  He rose to the rank of lieutenant, with 30 boys at his command.