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Chameleon Days: An American Boyhood in Ethiopia
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About Chameleon Days: An American Boyhood In Ethiopia
Product Description In 1964, at the age of three, Tim Bascom is thrust into a world of eucalyptus trees and stampeding baboons when his family moves from the Midwest to Ethiopia. The unflinchingly observant narrator of this memoir reveals his missionary parents’ struggles in a sometimes hostile country. Sent reluctantly to boarding school in the capital, young Tim finds that beyond the gates enclosing that peculiar, isolated world, conflict roils Ethiopian society. When secret riot drills at school are followed with an attack by rampaging students near his parents' mission station, Tim witnesses the disintegration of his family’s African idyll as Haile Selassie’s empire begins to crumble. Like Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Chameleon Days chronicles social upheaval through the keen yet naive eyes of a child. Bascom offers readers a fascinating glimpse of missionary life, much as Barbara Kingsolver did in The Poisonwood Bible. From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. In 1964, three-year-old Bascom and his two brothers were uprooted from Kansas via Missouri by their missionary parents and taken to the family's personal Oz—Ethiopia. Bascom's father was a doctor, and the family went first to an established mission hospital in Soddo, then in 1967 to a nascent outpost in Liemo. In Ethiopia, Tim and his older brother, Johnathan, attended boarding school—American children walled in from their African neighbors. Bascom's recollections of moments and conversations from his childhood are narrated with delightfully puerile wonder. Memories of a pet chameleon, a banquet with the emperor, the descent of winged termites, a hideaway high in an avocado tree and the cry of hyenas outside the bedroom window on Christmas Eve are apt to remind adult readers of their own less exotic youthful discoveries and stoke the imaginations of older children and young adults. Such precision in voice earned Bascom the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference Bakeless Prize, and his smartly naïve observations grow more sophisticated as the country succumbs to political unrest in the 1970s and missionary life becomes uncertain. Nostalgic but not overwrought, Bascom's memoir is accented with casual family snapshots like ribbons on the gift of a gently captured place in time. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. About the Author Tim Bascom spent much of his childhood in Ethiopia, where his father, a doctor, worked in mission hospitals. A graduate of the nonfiction writing program at the University of Iowa, he has been published in The Best American Travel Writing. He lives in Newton, Iowa, with his wife and two sons. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Baboons on a Cliff As we left the Addis Ababa airport and started across the city, my brother Johnathan and I stared out the windows of the Volkswagen van like dazed astronauts. He was six and I was only three, but we were both old enough to sense that life might never be the same. A torrent of brown-skinned aliens streamed by on both sides, treating the road like a giant sidewalk, their white shawls and bright head wraps bobbing as they weaved around each other. Donkeys and oxen bumped into the van, whipped along by barefoot men in ballooning shorts. After sixteen hours in an airplane, we found that our whole world had disappeared. Gone was the quiet stucco house in Saint Joseph, Missouri, where we had lived while Dad began his medical practice at the state hospital. Gone were the tire-thrumming brick streets of Hiawatha, Kansas, where we were given candies and back-scratches from Grandmother. Gone were the maple trees and the old-fashioned street lamps, lit up like glowing ice cream cones. We had stepped onto a Pan Am jet in one world and stepped off in another, as if transported clear across the galaxy. Our driver braked for a truck being unloaded, and children pressed their faces against the glass,
