Local reflections on international issues

Deborah Ellis.

Leah Bauer

Advocate Contributor

Local author and activist Deborah Ellis is originally from Paris, Ont., but has called Norfolk County her home for a number of years. Her dream was always to be a writer, and that dream combined with her passion for human rights, has led her through a continuously interesting and inspiring career.

While Ellis was born in Southwestern Ontario, the subjects of her novels come from all around the world. One of the defining works of her career, The Breadwinner, features the fictional story of an 11-year-old girl living in Kabul, Afghanistan. Ellis’s novels have demonstrated hardships faced by young people in places such as Bolivia, Guyana, Palestine, India, and across Canada.

“I have been lucky enough to do both fiction and non-fiction,” said Ellis. “Generally, I cover war, of one kind or another.”

Her commitment to highlighting the stories of people living in conflict areas, and in difficult situations, has allowed her to meet people from all over the world.

“For the books set in Afghanistan, I spent time in the refugee camps in Pakistan, meeting with all kinds of people, and then I was later able to actually go into Afghanistan.”

Highlighting the voices of those affected by global issues is very important to Ellis.

“We do not often get to hear from people in these circumstances about what it is like on a day-to-day basis to live in this situation. Most of the people who are killed or are harmed in war are civilians, not combatants. A lot of the people who are killed in war now have nothing to do with it, such as children or families." 

Ellis believes a humanized perspective on those affected by war should be at the forefront of conversations about international conflict.

“We need to be aware of all aspects of war, because when we are saying ‘let’s go to war with this country over here,’ we are also saying ‘let’s go kill these families over here.’”

The subjects of Ellis's writing are often difficult and confronting. In addition to this, her books are mainly written for a young adult audience. This juxtaposition is not lost on Ellis who said, “I generally write for young people, and they get the sense of there being a lot of questions that need to be asked. If the books I write can prompt them to ask more questions, then that is a good thing.

“We tend to accept the world as it is presented to us, and we kind of forget that maybe we can ask questions about why it is this way. Am I really being told the truth, or am I being told a lie to further someone else’s agenda? By getting into the stories of what it means to be a civilian in a time of war, a person living with a preventable disease, or a child in the criminal justice system, we can begin to think more about how we might structure our society to better care for one another.”

Ellis applied this philosophy to current international conflicts.

“Let’s take the current American war in Iran right now. Three thousand people have been killed in Iran, most of them civilians. We do not know who they are, we do not know what happened to them. By not knowing these things it makes it easier to get in the mindset of just believing what we are told. But if we start to understand the stories of those affected, we can understand what the price of the war really is, and what we are giving our consent to.”

Ellis believes that understanding the lives and the stories of those affected by international conflict can change the way war is understood.

“We are giving our consent, permission and tax dollars to devastation in another part of the world. Eventually we develop a sort of built-up ignorance to these things, we begin to see affected people as another and not the same as us. But we all laugh, cry, fall in and out of love or have arguments with our in-laws. When we address that it becomes a realization of ‘well they are not that different from me, why are we killing them?”

Ellis's international advocacy has led her to examine the borderless impacts of conflict. Nevertheless, her work remains rooted in a local spirit.

“Whether we are living in Norfolk County, or whether we’re living in Kabul, we all need to have courage to deal with the things that life throws at us. And we can gain courage by being inspired by stories of other people’s courage.” 

Although Ellis's stories take readers across the globe, her message remains relevant close to home. From Norfolk County to Kabul, she believes empathy, curiosity, and courage are essential to understanding one another and building a more compassionate world.