FernFolio » drugs

Lunches with Lenin by Deborah Ellis

fernfolio — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:46:28 +0000

Matthew buys pot from Hammer, the high school football captain and local source for marijuana, though he knows he’s being overcharged and risks discovery by one of the sniffer dogs the school administration regularly bring in. Tahmina is proud of her expertise in harvesting opium from her father’s poppies, until disaster strikes and the local police move in and destroy the crop, leaving her father with few options to repay his debt to the local money lender. Fifteen-year old Brandon reacts with rage when he learns that all of his learning problems, and difficulties controlling his behaviour are consequences of his mother’s drinking when she was pregnant with him. Abandoned in Red Square, when he was a child of five, by his mother who said she was going to visit Lenin’s tomb, Valerin grows up in state institutions until, at sixteen, he is released to make his own way in the world, and is offered a chance at the Gates of Heaven, through an injection of heroin, by his only friend.
Deborah Ellis’ Lunch with Lenin is a collection of short stories that examine the human cost of illegal drugs and substance abuse through the eyes of teenagers in Russia, Afghanistan, Canada, the US, the Philippines, Mongolia, and Bolivia. Searing and tender and brutally honest, Ellis’ stories are nothing short of wonderful. A must-read for Intermediate students.
FernFolio Editor

Jakeman by Deborah Ellis

fernfolio — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 18:13:54 +0000

Eleven year-old Jacob Tyronne DeShawn’s mother is in prison serving a lengthy sentence, and he and his sixteen year-old sister Shoshona travel ten hours four times a year to visit her. Accompanied by Ms. Granite, a social worker, a rag-tag collection of children and adolescents boards an old school bus after midnight on the Friday of the Mother’s Day weekend for the long journey to Wickham Correctional Institute for Women.
While Jake and Shoshona have made the trip many times before, for some of the children on the bus, this is their first experience with the long waits, the invasive searches, and the barbed wire fences, as well as the harsh and uncompromising attitudes of prison staff. These children whose mothers are in prison know a great deal about poverty and abandonment, the foster care system, and prejudice, and they have all found ways to cope with the loss of their mothers. Shoshona is always in control, and is focussed on doing well in school so that she can become a singer. Jake retreats into the world of Jakeman, the comic book hero he has created in the pages of his notebook. Carolyn has stopped talking. Harlan is always angry.
The prison visits prove difficult. Jake fears his mother won’t recognize him, Shoshona is taken to task for not looking after her younger brother better, and both are blamed for their mother’s troubles – if only they hadn’t always been asking for things. Harlan, still grieving for his mother after her death in prison from appendicitis, confronts the prison warden and is immediately escorted from the prison.
On the way home, Ms. Granite and many of the children become ill from food poisoning and are hospitalized. Left in the care of a nasty bus driver who makes no secret of his dislike for them, Jake and Shoshona and a small group of children start the long trip back to the city. But, when Shoshona realizes that the driver is drunk, the kids on the bus stage a revolt. After leaving the driver lying at the side of the road, they take off to discover if they really are just the sum of everything that is written in their children’s aid files or if, just possibly, they might be a whole lot more.
Written by the wonderful Deborah Ellis, Jakeman is a tough, funny and tender story about the young and unintended victims of the justice system.
FernFolio Editor

Tom Finder by Martine Leavitt

fernfolio — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 01:23:35 +0000

The first thing Tom remembers is walking, his back and backside screaming in pain. He has forgotten everything that came before, family, friends, school, his last name. In his backpack he finds a notebook with notes about Mozart and a candy heart imprinted with the words You are nice, so he concludes that he is nice, and when he finds a big native man standing at the river’s edge praying and weeping, he asks if he can help. The native man, Samuel Wolflegs, is looking for his son, Daniel, a drug addict, who is living on the streets. Samuel looks at Tom and sees him as the answer to his prayers. Although loser is the first word Tom hears after forgetting, Samuel calls him a finder and asks him to look for his son.
Armed with his notebook, in which he compulsively records what he finds and a mind so empty of memory and preconception that each new experience, large and small, resonates in his heart and soul and intellect, Tom sets out to find Daniel. On his 3-month journey, he finds Jenks, a homeless man who sees ghosts, Jeans, a claustrophobic chicken cooker from Jamaica who longs to get home so he can marry his sweetheart, Gina, and Pam, a beautiful young girl sliding down the slippery slope into prostitution. He also finds that he possesses strengths and abilities; he can spell, he can run fast and swim, he can work out deals for food, a locker, clothing and the occasional shower, and he can make things true by writing about them.
Martine Leavitt’s Tom Finder is a moving story about a young man who looks for another lost youth and finds himself. Written in words that flow like poetry, this book is a must read for students from Grade 7.
Fern Folio Editor

Sacred Leaf by Deborah Ellis

fernfolio — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 02:04:25 +0000

Newly escaped from the coca pits and mourning the death of his best friend Mando, twelve year-old Diego has found refuge with the Ricardos, a family of poor coca farmers. In return for their shelter, Diego tries his best to help the Ricardos, looking after two year-old Santo and helping with the garden while Mr. and Mrs. Ricardo, their son, Martino, and their twelve year-old daughter, Bonita, struggle to harvest the coca crops before disaster can befall them.
Word has reached the Ricardos that the Bolivian army has conducted raids on other farms, confiscating their coca harvest and destroying the coca plants. When the army arrives, and takes the coca, and tramples over the vegetable garden, Diego is overcome with rage and attacks the army trucks. He is arrested and taken to a nearby army base where he argues for the return of the coca harvest, the Ricardo’s only means of earning cash to pay for things they are unable to grow or make themselves, and where he learns that the American government is paying the Bolivian government to eradicate the coca crop in an effort to cut off the flow of cocaine into the States.
Determined to get their crops back, the Cocaleros, or coca farmers, set up a blockade on a nearby bridge and refuse to let traffic pass. When the army is sent to negotiate with the protesters, Diego is allowed to rejoin his friends, the Ricardos, and discovers that they and their neighbours are prepared to do whatever is necessary to get justice for themselves and for other Cocaleros across Bolivia.
As the blockade continues, Diego learns much about the quiet courage of grandmothers and children and little nuns, and just as much about the hypocrisy of many of those in authority. He and the other very ordinary Bolivians who occupy the bridge learn to organize themselves to meet the needs of one another, and to resist the urge to respond to the escalating threats of their adversaries with violence. Most importantly, perhaps, they, and Diego, learn that sometimes the best you can hope for is to meet violence and oppression with courage and dignity.
This sequel to Deborah Ellis’ I am a Taxi is a profoundly moving book, one that explore the fight of poor farmers in Bolivia, caught up in North America’s single-minded drive to stamp out the illegal cocaine trade, often without regard to the cost paid by those least able to afford it. Do not miss this book!
FernFolio Editor

I am a Taxi by Deborah Ellis

fernfolio — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 18:19:36 +0000

I am a Taxi is the story of Diego Juárez, a thirteen-year old boy who lives with his mother and young sister in the women’s prison of San Sebastián. He struggles to support his family by running errands for inmates housed in both the women’s prison and the men’s prison next to it. His parents, poor coca farmers, are serving seventeen-year sentences for trafficking in coca paste, the illegal substance made from coca leaves and used to produce cocaine. Located in Cochabamba, Bolivia, the prisons of San Sebastián are filled to overcrowding with unfortunates who have been caught carrying coca paste, and, worse, innocents, such as Diego’s parents, who were simply unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the right time.
Diego dreams of returning to the family farm and the simple, happy life of his early childhood. He works hard in school, and tries to help his mother with his young sister, Carina. He regularly visits his father in the men’s prison, and strives to ensure that both his parents and his young sister have enough to eat. He worries that his mother, who knits baby coats and sleepers, which Diego sells in the market square, will not be able to earn enough to pay the rent on their tiny cell and that they will have to return to the spot in the prison yard which they occupied for their first two years in the prison.
Preoccupied, one evening, by a schoolmate’s homework assignment he is completing to earn a few bolivianos, Diego fails to notice when Carina wanders off. Though she is found safe and sound, Diego and his mother are called before a prison committee and assessed a hefty fine. But worse, Diego is told that he can no longer work as a taxi. When his friend Mando whispers that he has met some men who are prepared to offer the boys some real money in exchange for a couple of weeks’ work, Diego ignores the warning bells in his head and grabs at the chance to improve his family’s financial situation.
Diego and Mando find themselves working in the illegal coca paste industry. As the dangers mount, Diego begins to wonder whether the two friends will ever escape the coca pits.
I am a Taxi is the tale of coca, a plant that the indigenous peoples of Bolivia believe is a gift to them from Pachamama, Mother Earth, and one they have used for millennia for food and medicine. Diego and the other inhabitants of San Sebastián, as well as many other poor Bolivians, are victims of the war on drugs, caught between poverty and affluent nations’ insatiable appetite for cocaine.
Detailed, evocative and beautifully written, Deborah Ellis’ book will grab you from the first chapter. I am a Taxi is a must read for readers in grades 7 and up.
FernFolio Editor