Garbage King Themes

The Garbage King by Elizabeth Laird is a novel that highlights fairness and development problems around the world, told from the perspective of two boys (Mamo and Dani) and a girl (Tiggist) living on the streets of Addis Ababa. The story tells a tale of people, friends if you will, fighting for survival and overcoming challenges that many poor kids all over the world face. I think this book would be a superb book for an IB MYP class to conduct an extensive novel study on. This book features some of the issues that poor people have to face in their lives, some of which include: human trafficking, slavery and poverty. Because, this book deals with so many issues related to the IB context Fairness and Development, the story can help teach many students in the IB MYP program about global fairness and development issues.

In developing countries such as Ethiopia, problems like human trafficking have become an enormous problem. In the story The Garbage King, one of the main characters, Mamo, gets

The characters face obvious problems that homeless children would face such as, little food and water, shelter, little money and health problems (the case of Karate, a member of the gang). But the street children also face other problems that many kids living in developed countries also encounter (friendship/relationship problems, problems fitting in etc.). For example, when Dani first joins the gang, he feels like an outsider. If IB students were to read this book, they would have a new perspective and a deeper understanding on the topic of poverty. Poverty is an issue around the world, and having knowledge on this topic would greatly benefit IB MYP students. Students could then bring this topic up in discussions or relate this issue to the