This was a story told to young people in my village once a year. The storyteller, usually an elder, would pose this unanswerable question at the end of the story in the presence of the children’s parents. Every child who was present at the gathering was asked to give an answer, but no child ever did, since their mother and father were both present.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone- Memoirs of…, loc. 864