Outside Reading 1: Government

The book They Poured on us From the Sky is a book about the children of Sudan and their experience when they escaped the war in Sudan and moved into different camps and eventually arriving to America. A major topic in this book is the government. An issue that continues to rise up is the government trying to take too much control over the country. The Sudan government wants to make their country entirely Muslim and the characters in this book are not Muslim. The government would then take villages that were not Muslim or were supporting any type of uprising and burn them to the ground, including all of the people in it. The government of Sudan began this entire take over by killing off students that attended universities to hopefully have less people realizing what was going on. The government then moved onto elementary schools and started bombing those too. This is a major issue; a government should not try to kill off its inhabitants because it wants to change something in its system. What Sudan did was killed of their students and began burning down villages and killing people who were in anyway not fully for their cause. The book quotes "(the) Government starting killing all the smart students". A government is made to help create order and help those that live in its territories. What Sudan was doing was a take over and stopped listening to the people who lived in its borders. America is a place where people have the freedom to believe in whatever religion that they wish to believe in and praise any god or none at all. This is the way a government should be, willing to have their citizens decide who or what they want to worship. The narrators of the book discussed how they enjoyed that their women were able to have the freedoms that they had. The women were looked upon as respectful people and some would even become the head of the house if their man was absent and would sometimes join the men in battle. The people in this book did not want their women to have their rights taken away. They did not want their women to have to stay covered and to have much of the powers and rights that they owned to be taken away. No person should have to live their life being under someone else or not be able to wear what they want in fear of being beaten up. The government of a country should support its schooling and encourage the education. This is something that many people in America take for granted, a public education. Yet the government of Sudan was killing educated people, students and even bombing elementary schools. No government should be taking the lives of its citizens like they did in such brutal ways such as burning people alive in their houses or just coming into villages that could possibly be against a few of their beliefs. Governments should be supportive of education, the prosperity of its citizens and the freedom of religion.