16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Vivid and poignant, June 17, 2006
This review is from: Chameleon Days: An American Boyhood in Ethiopia (Paperback)
Four-year-old Tim wants "the straight scoop on hell." After a serious accident involving a hoe and his younger brother, visions of Cain and Abel ratchet up guilt. When his anguish collides with his missionary mother's flannel graph story--three men in the fiery furnace--his questions echo our own: What happens after death? When things go wrong, how does one hold a family together?
The Bascom family's years in Ethiopia unfold in vibrant detail. From the book's blurb we know they will face culture shock, hostilities and secret riot drills, isolation and a crumbling empire. These threats hum beneath the narrative surface, partnered by longing.
But this book is not in a hurry. Don't expect the sensationalized. Chameleon Days gives us time to absorb a foreign milieu, its rhythms, its natural wonders -- one of them emblematic of young Tim: a chameleon clutched his outstretched palm "... trying desperately to find a new balance, a new stability."
Without hyping events, without veering toward self-pity, Bascom honors as well as examines the ideals and frailties of faith as well as the people and system his parents strive to serve. With candor and great beauty, he evokes a childhood haunted by the feeling that no one understands his journey. Even on furlough he feels "like a foreign coin in a dime-store register." His epilogue provides a fitting capstone to a memoir that combines the shrewd with a lucid sensibility.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Two Worlds, One Childhood, May 26, 2006
This review is from: Chameleon Days: An American Boyhood in Ethiopia (Paperback)
Weeks after arriving in Ethiopia at the age of three with his medical missionary parents, Tim Bascom found a chameleon on a poinsettia tree. This little reptile, which changes its colour in order to blend into its environment and whose eyes operate separately so they can focus in two completely different directions simultaneously, makes a perfect symbol in this wonderfully evocative and beautifully written memoir for the complex demands missionaries' kids (MKs) negotiate. MKs like Bascom find themselves struggling between their parents' commitment to God's calling and their own fear of coming second to that calling, between the desire to fit into the culture their parents have brought them to and the sense that they are strangers from another place, and between the widespread stereotypes of missionaries as flaming fundamentalists and their own experience of their parents' love for and commitment to the people among whom they worked. Like the chameleon, Bascom wishes desperately to blend into the Ethiopian life his family has moved to, and like his pet, his eyes take in the world he is encountering in Ethiopia at the same time that they never lose sight of the American world his parents return to periodically.
In contrast to the image of the single-minded, unself-questioning missionary which recurs in literature from Jane Eyre to The Poisonwood Bible, Bascom presents missionaries as rounded human beings, drawn by Christian ideals to intervene in a world of remarkable inequity, sometimes unprepared for the cultural and political exchanges they find themselves in, but nonetheless committed to the people they have come to work among. Chameleon Days mixes a great love for these human people and admiration for the goals that motivated them with a deep sadness for the costs his family paid, especially when the children, as was the pattern in the 1960s and 1970s of his childhood, were sent to boarding school when they were much too young. "I felt as if I had been tipped off a cliff and begun a long, long fall," writes Bascom of the day the gates closed behind his parents' Land Rover and he was left to find his way at age seven in the frightening, loud environment of a dormitory. Bascom's craft as a writer emerges in sentences such as this, for this image of the cliff recalls one he witnessed in his preschool years when a startled clan of baboons had fled in panic, "rippling down the sheer rock-face like a muscular brown liquid." Like those baboons, who found safe resting places on the face of the cliff, Bascom too describes being suspended in places of fragile, but lively beauty, such as the avocado tree at Soddo, the cedar at the boarding school in Addis Ababa, and the eucalyptus at Leimo from which he as a young boy sat undiscovered and watched the unfolding world around him. This is a book of perceptive observations that invites readers to enter into this boy's leafy hideouts and observe with him both its marvels and its pains. From these vantage points, we wonder with him at the life of the boy with one leg who hops by on his crutch, at the vindictiveness of privileged boarding school children who throw stones at Ethiopian women outside the school fence, and at the amazing architecture of a weaver bird's nest at Lake Bishoftu.
Like the best of memoirs, Chameleon Days is not self-absorbed. Instead, it is an evocation of a world, the in-between world of missionary families during a period of rising turbulence in Ethiopia and Africa more generally. Bascom's parents arrived in Ethiopia in 1964, during the last years of the feudal regime of Haile Selassie, and they left for the United States in 1969, during the period of political unrest that led up to Selassie's overthrow in 1974 and the subsequent rise to power of Mengistu Haile Mariam's brutal Marxist-Leninist regime. The book evokes the mounting tension through Bascom's childhood dream of the Emperor teetering with him at the edge of the cliff etched in his memory by the terrified baboons and through terse conversations between his parents about the resentment they encounter among the Ethiopian staff at the hospital in Leimo. Never overwhelming the boy's frame of reference with an adult's explanation of the larger politics, Bascom conveys these larger pressures through tensions between missionaries on the hospital staff, his own recurring headaches that meant he eventually was brought home from boarding school, and his family's reluctant and dispirited return to Kansas. Woven throughout, there are brilliant passages evoking the sensuous life of a small boy who lives close to the waxy leaves, red earth, and damp grass of the Ethiopian highlands.
It is as if somebody flipped a switch at the new millennium and missionary children began to write the story of growing up in the inter-cultural world of Western evangelical missionaries in Africa or Asia. Chameleon Days is the latest distinguished addition (by my count) to three recent memoirs by MKs: Jonathan Addleton's Some Far and Distant Place (U. Georgia P, 1997) set in Pakistan, Elaine Neil Orr's Gods of Noonday (U Virginia Press, 2003) in Nigeria, and my own Scent of Eucalyptus (Goose Lane Editions, 2003) set, like Bascom's book, in Ethiopia. The call for these books has risen with the number of readers who have experienced the dislocations and fascinations of intercultural migration themselves, who want to explore not just the surfaces but the subtleties and nuances of living between cultures, and who are interested in the considerations and spiritual quandaries that arise in any kind of cross-cultural development work. Like these others, Bascom's book makes important and insightful reading for anyone involved in this kind of work, whether in the diplomatic corps, non-governmental organizations, or faith-based agencies. It will also resonate with many "Third Culture Kids"--those children who grew up in an in-between culture, not quite wholly immersed in the host culture nor totally in their parents' culture, because of their family's work overseas.
Daniel Coleman
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Common memories, June 30, 2006
This review is from: Chameleon Days: An American Boyhood in Ethiopia (Paperback)
Having lived in the house across the street from Tim and his family in Ethiopia for a few years, the book really resonated with me. The memories of the sights and smells were brought back in such a powerful way! When I got the book I sat down and read the whole thing from cover to cover. When I was finished I felt like I had actually been there. My children have heard about my childhood Ethiopia for years, and are reading the book as well, and are amazed at all the familiar phrases that they have heard for years from me. It has been enlightening for them to hear another voice from my past. Love this book!
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