Heroes
by Dani

“When it is dark, you can see the sky.” This quote has a lot to do with the heroes that we know. Look at Superman and Spiderman for instance. We all love these fictional characters because they always conquer the bad guys.

We read a book called Persepolis, which was a graphic novel about a young girl named Marji, who over comes a lot of challenges that she has in her life. One of her heroes was her Uncle, who was sent to prison and then later killed because the government found out that he was a Russian Spy. Then she was sent to live with her family friends, who later on sent her to a boarding school. She went through many things here. She started doing drugs, got cheated on, and eventually ended up on the streets. When she went home the war was almost over and she was very happy. The governments made the females wear a veil, which made them hide their hair.

Later on we watched a movie called Swing Kids. It is about some boys who love to dance swing, but the government doesn’t allow swing music in their country anymore. For these boys it was a lot to go against the rules because you can get into a lot of trouble. One of the boys Thomas eventually ends up believing all of the things that the government is teaching them. He turns in his dad, goes against his best friend, and almost kills his best friend. I think the true hero in this film was the boy who stood up for everyone. He made sure that everyone was doing okay and he had fun while he was doing it. It took a lot of guts for him to see what was inside of the boxes. Inside the boxes were ashes of people who were killed.

On the last week of school, we watched a film called Hotel Rwanda. What I watched of this movie was really sad. People were getting killed because they were Tutsis or Hutus. This movie was about a man named Paul who was Hutu and his wife was Tutsi. He ended up saving all of these people who would have gotten killed. He gave everything he had to make sure his family was safe and it eventually paid off. He ended up saving about 800,000 people, with the help of his friends and the army. Now, in real life there is still the war going on only it is in Congo. I think it is very sad that nice people have to go through things. I think that the hero was Paul because he could have been killed, but he didn’t care because he wanted to save his family.