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Indlæser... Walking the Bowl: A True Story of Murder and Survival Among the Street Children of Lusaka (2022)af Chris Lockhart
Indlæser...
Bliv medlem af LibraryThing for at finde ud af, om du vil kunne lide denne bog. Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog. Absolutely masterful storytelling - I had to occasionally remind myself that what I was reading really happened and wasn’t fiction. It’s remarkable what the authors undertook to make this storytelling happen. And how the individual threads tied together at the end. Just amazing - read this! ( ) This book is about the lives of Street children in the capital of zambia, lusaka. These children have such a hand to mouth existence, and life is so cruel, that they keep a plastic bottle filled with glue and mixed with solvents, to constantly take sniffs from. But the title, "walking the bowl," is a lovely premise: doing a kindness for someone, and telling them to repay you by paying it forward, or doing an act of kindness for another. It has a snowball effect in this story that makes for a lovely, if unrealistic ending. > Of those incidents that are described in this book beginning with the discovery of Ho Kid's body, approximately 85% were directly observed by a team member. Additionally, approximately 75% of quotes were captured with an audio recorder. > Making street kids torture one of their own was another tactic favored by the police. It instilled the maximum amount of fear in their authority while ensuring that their own hands remained clean. It also crushed the spirits of those who were forced to take part. And last, but not least, it cultivated a low-grade civil war of sorts among street children since Bullet—or even Cheelo himself if he survived—would almost certainly seek revenge. It was just another means of fragmenting a problematic population. It is estimated there are over 100 million street children in the world. We know of them best by faceless NGO statistics, and occasionally brought to life in books like Behind the Beautiful Forevers. It is one of my favorite books so I was intrigued to read this account of street children in Lusaka, Zambia, a city of 6 million in south-central Africa. Brace yourself, this is a trip through hell. Beyond the descriptions of glue sniffing, rape, begging, human trafficking, etc.. there is a story about a murder and one street kids journey through the (literal) underworld of Lusaka to find the killer before he too is killed. In the end, there is a message of hope within the title, which the reader can discover what it means. It's remarkable the authors, who are aid workers, were able to piece together the events of a stunning drama in the lives of a few anonymous African street children. It is eye opening and unforgettable.
There have been other novelistic nonfiction narratives about the daily lives of the urban poor, notably Katherine Boo’s 2012 book, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers.” But daily life, meticulously recorded, rarely has the attributes of a novel — a clean arc of ascending action, a handful of vivid characters, an ending that snaps shut like a purse. “Walking the Bowl,” remarkably, has all of those. Distinktioner
For readers of Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Nothing to Envy, this is a breathtaking real-life story of four street children in contemporary Zambia whose lives are drawn together and forever altered by the mysterious murder of a fellow street child. Based on years of investigative reporting and unprecedented fieldwork, Walking the Bowl immerses readers in the daily lives of four unforgettable characters: Lusabilo, a determined waste picker; Kapula, a burned-out brothel worker; Moonga, a former rock crusher turned beggar; and Timo, an ambitious gang leader. These children navigate the violent and poverty-stricken underworld of Lusaka, one of Africa's fastest growing cities. When the dead body of a ten-year-old boy is discovered under a heap of garbage in Lusaka's largest landfill, a murder investigation quickly heats up due to the influence of the victim's mother and her far-reaching political connections. The children's lives become more closely intertwined as each child engages in a desperate bid for survival against forces they could never have imagined. Gripping and fast-paced, the book exposes the perilous aspects of street life through the eyes of the children who survive, endure and dream there, and what emerges is an ultimately hopeful story about human kindness and how one small good deed, passed on to others, can make a difference in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Ingen biblioteksbeskrivelser fundet. |
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Google Books — Indlæser... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)362.96894Social sciences Social problems and services; associations Social problems of & services to groups of people Social work and welfare in particular countries and regions AfricaLC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit:
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