Journal 6 by Matt

In The House On Mango Street my biggest takeaway was that no matter how hard you try you won't ever be able to escape who you are and where you came from. This was a big struggle for Esperanza to face. Throughout the whole book Esperanza try to convince herself that Mango street is not her. At the end of the book she is told that no matter how hard she tries Mango street will allows be apart of her. I feel that this is important because I feel that there is a lot of people who try to escape who they are and where they came from. This book does a great job of showing that you need to embrace where you came from and not be ashamed of it. I feel that In A Long Way Gone, the biggest takeaway is that the human spirt is stronger than most people think. In this book there is not a moment where Beah's human spirt is challenged. He is faced with some of the worst decisions a young kid would ever have to face. Throughout all this loss he keeps his head up and keeps pushing forward. This shows that even in the face of death and loss the human spirt is stronger than most people think.  one thing that i will not forget about Beah's experiences is the of brain washing. This young kid went from being a normal everyday kid to a cold blooded killer. In the book Beah says " The idea of death didn't cross my mind at all and killing had become as easy as drinking water"(Beah 122). This just shows the level of brain washing was done to these young kids.

This film made me smile. These kids came from a place kind of like Mango Street and were not as privileged as most kids. Mr. Raif had a huge impact on these kids. He wanted these kids to turn out to have better lives then they do now. These kids faced things such as violence and dug addiction in their neighborhoods . Mr. Raif tried to get these lids away from this ongoing occurrences by getting them all active in the classroom. This just showed me just how privileged I am to grow up the way i did. These kids did not have near the amount of opportunities that I had growing up as a kid and they still prevailed. One of the things that Mr. Raif said was that "this is just the beginning". I thought that was so cool to think that Mr. Raif got these kids ready for a bright future and that this was just the beginning for them.