Teacher Preparation
for the HL IOA:
Nowhere boy
Annotated extract
EXTRACT 3 (Ch 23, Beginning)
Ahmed wished he could describe the exodus—mattresses, carpets,
children and old people crammed together in the flatbeds of pickup
trucks; whole families teetering on a single motorcycle like some
desperate circus act; even people on foot, carrying children and
overstuffed sacks on their backs. Even without petrol, Ahmed’s family
could have left that way, but the school seemed safe and his father
feared that the refugee camps forming outside the city might be
targets too. So they had waited several days till the bombs seemed
less frequent and the artillery fire more distant.
“A few days later, it is quiet, we go home. Many buildings fallen on
ground, shops closed, few car on road. But our home is there.”
Ahmed was certain Max could never understand the relief they had all English not perfect...
felt to see it still standing. It was only when they had stumbled inside,
tears brimming in his mother’s eyes, the girls almost giddy, that they
realized that the TV, his father’s desktop computer, the table and every
Can we understand
things that we have
single one of the chairs were gone, looted most likely by rebels. A foul
not experienced? smell drifted from the kitchen. The food in the fridge had rotted after
the power went out. At nearly the same time, his sister Jasmine
shouted that the toilet wouldn’t flush.
01
“Many problems, though. No water, electric, phone,” Ahmed
explained to Max. “Mother, father get ready to leave—they pack
photos, documents, clothes. But there is no bomb that night and
What would you do?
everyone is tired.”
They were awakened the next morning just before dawn by the call to
Is it part of human prayer. As the sun rose, the neighborhood came creeping back—a few
nature?
merchants’ carts, a handful of neighbors inspecting the sandbags piled
up at an intersection. The electricity flickered on, a radio blared, a baby
cried. That was how it began—the illusion that life could be normal
again. As his parents and sisters sat on the floor and quietly ate stale
bread and fig jam, Ahmed could tell that none of them wanted to
leave. When the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire echoed through the air, they
froze mid-bite. An eerie silence fell outside, as if they all were birds and
a cat was passing. But as soon as the gunfire stopped, the sounds and What does this tell us
about the type of
voices returned and Ahmed and his family went back to eating.
person his father is?
“Father feel bad to leave his students,” Ahmed explained. “We decide
not to go.”
Normal? They never made an actual decision to stay, though. An emergency
bag always remained packed, waiting by the door. It was more that one
day stretched into another and the rat-a-tat-tat became a familiar
background noise. Some stores reopened, and, with one of their
Continued
02
remaining neighbors, they bought a generator, which gave enough
energy to power the fridge. Ahmed helped his grandfather plant
vegetables—squash, fava beans, potatoes—in the little garden in his
grandfather’s nursery that they had always filled with flowering plants.
Human ingenuity They learned to collect water when the taps worked and to bring Are family
and survival relationships the
containers to the large metal water stations when they didn’t. They
adaptability. How same regardless of
even learned to play inside when it seemed too dangerous to go out, cultures?
are you coping with
being inside Ahmed inventing games for Jasmine, who was seven, and Nouri, who
was only three.
“At end of summer,” he continued, “I go back to school.”
It was the same school he had attended the year before, but it felt
different with half the teachers and more than half the students gone.
Some, like Hassan, had been killed, but most had fled to Turkey, Jordan
or Lebanon. It took several weeks to figure out a new football team,
What places make
what with the center having lost a leg, the left wing dead and the
you feel safe?
goalie and halfback in Turkey. There were also days when it was too
dangerous to walk the five blocks to school, so his father taught him
Negative
and Jasmine at home. But on the days that he could go, Ahmed was
happy to be there, if only because he imagined he was safe. But that
feeling didn’t last long.
Continued
03
“That spring, school is bombed. Thank God, no one is there, but
building is no more. After this, I stay home.”
“Did you feel safe there?” Max asked
Do we need a shared language to bond
To what extent should our experiences help us bond? Heal
Have you ever imagined how important school is
Do we need to go through difficult situations to value what
we have?
Excerpt From: Katherine Marsh. “Nowhere Boy.” Apple Books.
04
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