Editor’s note: The IJ is reprinting some of the late Beth Ashley’s columns. This is from 2007.

Walking to my front door, I admire the lilies still in bloom by the sidewalk. Inside the house, I flick on the lights — and stop to think how miraculous they are.

This week, more than ever, I’m appreciating all the good things that make up my life.

I have just finished reading three books that describe almost unspeakable hardship and violence — in places far from Marin, but nonetheless part of my world.

How can we not count our blessings when we read books like these?

• Dave Eggers’ “What is the What” tells the story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the “lost boys of Sudan.” Eggers has written the biography of Deng, whose village in southern Sudan is destroyed by Arab militiamen at the outbreak of a mindless civil war.

Deng — then 7 — flees the attackers on foot, and dodges and scavenges his way for months through war-wracked territory looking for safety and scraps of food. He endures unimaginable hardship and sees indescribable savagery; at length he joins a small group of other boys who are walking toward Ethiopia, which he is told is a sanctuary.

The small group of boys — diseased, barely clad — grows to hundreds.

They walk for months. Many die from starvation, exhaustion, bullets or lions that eat them alive.

The boys ultimately reach a refugee camp in Ethiopia, but, after three years, civil war erupts there, too, and the boys must move on to Kenya, to another barren camp where Deng exists for 10 pointless years.

In 1998, he comes to the United States, part of a humanitarian movement to save the legendary lost boys. But life in America isn’t easy either. When the book ends, he is still struggling for a job, an education and an identity to match his aspirations.

• “Enrique’s Journey,” by former Los Angeles Times reporter Sonia Nazario, describes the perilous treks made by Central American children trying to find the mothers who have left them for jobs in the United States. Enrique’s mother leaves so she can earn money to feed her family, on the brink of starvation in Honduras. Enrique longs to see her again, to feel her love, so he sets out for the United States — eight times — to find her.

Seven times — after stunning hardships — he is captured and sent back to Honduras.

Author Nazario retraces Enrique’s journeys and describes the brutality he encounters as he makes his way north on the top of trains — blistering heat and terrible cold, persistent hunger, robbery and beatings at the hands of corrupt police or predatory gangs.

He sees his companions slip from the train tops, or lose limbs, sucked under wheels. Enrique’s legs are scarred from leaping on and off the moving trains.

Once, robbers strip him of his pants, on the waistband of which is his mother’s telephone number in the States.

The story is occasionally graced with tales of kindness along the way — individuals who devote their lives to helping the “migrants,” whole communities in Oaxaca and Veracruz who — though impoverished themselves — throw food and clothes to the migrants as the trains pass by.

Underlying the saga of Enrique’s journey is the sorrow of children separated from their mothers, who meant to help their children, but instead left them with a sense of abandonment, loneliness and terrible need.

• Ishmael Beah’s “A Long Way Gone” is a lyrical description of a childhood horror.

Beah was 13 when his village in Sierra Leone was burned and its inhabitants slaughtered by an army of rebels seeking to replace the central government. Ishmael and five friends run for safety, but the rebels and the government army are everywhere, burning, destroying and killing: There is so much blood, he says, the Earth can no longer absorb it.

He finds temporary safety in an army camp, until he is forced to become a soldier himself.

He learns to destroy and kill, too.

He is a boy soldier for two years.

He is ultimately rescued by a United Nations project that rehabilitates young victims of war. When fighting breaks out again, he escapes Sierra Leone, makes his way to Guinea and comes to the United States.

It is many months before his nightmares fade, and he can forgive himself for the atrocities he committed while still a child.

After immersion in these three books, I am looking for a good novel or a mystery story where people seemingly die for a reason.

The three books will haunt me for weeks.

Is it really possible to co-exist on this planet with such suffering as these boys describe?

Can we find some way to stop it?