A Long Way Gone: Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

Beah looks upon the moon one night, noticing how it is often covered by clouds, but continues to shine all night long. Beah thinks his journey is like that of the moon, except, of course, worse. Beah then thinks about how Saidu said each time they are attacked, it feels like a part of him dies. Bea worries that he too is slowly dying.

On the other hand, Beah knows that there are the times that good things happen, and that they are kept afloat by these times, like the one where some men not only welcomed them to their village, but invited them to go hunting and the subsequent feast. While lying in a hammock in the village before the meal, Beah remembers laying in his grandmother’s hammock, and again is swept up by his memories of his family.

After the meal, there is singing and dancing. The boys stay up all night, but leave in the morning, buoyed, but only for a moment, by the generosity of the villagers, who have even given them some meat for their journey.

As the others boys fall asleep that night, Beah remembers how wonderful his name-giving ceremony was, how safe he felt to be welcomed into his community. In the morning, the meat is gone. The boys blame each other, only to find it was a dog who had gotten into their meat. As the boys walk on, Alhaji says angrily that he should’ve killed the dog and eaten it, and the other boys are surprised and worried by his aggression. But Musa agrees, saying that Malaysians eat dogs, and that his father would have been fine with him eating what he had to.

The boys begin to tell each other of their last day in Mattru Jong. Musa ran out of his town with his mother and father, but his mother was somehow left behind, and when his father went back to get her, the rebels attacked, and Musa left. Alhaji ran to his house, to find it empty. Kanei made it across the river that many had drowned in, and had heard his mother and father had escaped. Jumah and Moriba had lost their parents. Saidu’s sisters were raped, and all of the rest of his family kidnapped, while he hid in the attic.

Beah says that the moon followed them at night, but that it also hid at night behind clouds so it couldn’t see the terrible things happening. One day, a crow falls out of the sky, dead, and although this seems ominous to the boys, the boys eat it. After they are done, silence overtakes the surrounding nature.

That night is too dark for Beah, ominously so, but the boys must walk on. At a bridge, they hide from some strangers, but are not found. When the strangers move on, the boys cannot find Saidu, and when they do, he is lying there unmoving. Someone says that maybe it was the bird they ate. As night turns rapidly to morning, the boy decide they will have to carry Saidu, but as they do, he awakes, telling the other boys the strangers were ghosts.

The boys come upon a village, the largest they have been in. They see familiar faces, a woman even comes and tells them that she recognizes them and has seen Junior, and that Beah’s mother and father are two days’ walk away. Beah is elated. That night they steal a pot of rice and cassava leaves, but Beah cannot sleep that night, feeling something is not right. Dogs begin to cry in an eerily human way, and in the morning, Saidu is silent and unmoving again. This time he has passed away.

Beah cannot believe Saidu has died. He thinks at first that he has simply fainted and will get up soon. But then Saidu is buried, and Beah understands. He remembers Saidu saying how he was dying slowly. The dogs cry again that night. The boys decide to walk on, sobbing, wondering who will die next.