The Bite of the Mango

I decided to do my diversity paper based off the book The Bite of the Mango. This book is co-written by Mariatu Kamara and Susan McClelland, but Mariatu is who this book is about. There are so many different aspects I could use about this book to talk about diversity, but I will mainly focus on African Refugees. The book starts out with Mariatu at age 11 living off the coast of Africa in a small village is Sierra Leone. There were frequent rumors of Rebels attacking her village but nothing ever happened. This was until one day when Mariatu was set out to go to a neighboring village and the rebels attacked her. The rebels kidnapped and tortured her for hours and eventually cut off both of her hands and sent her free. Mariatu had to overcome many trials and tribulations but eventually was able to get out of her country and be free. According to Forgenow.org a refugee is "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country." Mariatu and her village lived in fear of the rebels taking over for years, and finally when that day came there was nobody around to help, not even the government. Here in America we take for granted every day our safety and freedom in this country, whereas in African there are people fighting to stay alive. Mariatu wasn’t the only refugee who got their hands cut off; there were thousands of other who got parts of their bodies butchered off by rebels. This was just the beginning of Mariatu’s struggle; it took her a while to get to the capital where she was fighting to stay alive. When she got to Freetown she met up with her cousins who had went through the same torture Mariatu did. After surgery and many weeks of recovering Mariatu joined her fellow refugee’s on the street begging to survive. For a