Customer Reviews

Chameleon Days: An American Boyhood in Ethiopia

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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

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!

I was transported through time as I read Tim Bascom's Chameleon Days, and I have been connected to one of my daughters in a new way as she read the book and had a glimpse into an aspect of my personal history that I have rarely shared. Tim Bascom's Bingham Academy experience occurred a few years after my own, but there was little difference. As he described each facet of life at Bingham, I relived my own experiences and shuddered again to think that there was any reason big enough to send small children away to boarding school. Thank you, Tim, for the opportunity to once again "see" the weaver birds' nests at Lake Bishoftu, and praise be to God for His loving care as we were away from our parents at such tender ages.

I agree with the positive reviews for this book. While I doubt the 3 and 4 year old Tim was quite a precocious as he portrayed himself, I trust his impressions of landing in Ethiopia and experiencing the physical beauty and cultural strangeness of his and his family's thrust into this fascinating culture. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia and Eritrea from 1972 to 1974 and spent time visiting the local American Mission compound in Metu, getting to know the missionary families some of whose children were home schooled and some who were sent to Addis to boarding school. One of the little boys had a pet chameleon!
I was immersed in the culture because I was a teacher in the local public school and got to know Ethiopian children and teachers very well. I lived in the town and dealt with the day to day culture challenges. I had to learn Amharinya, just to survide.
It was a tough two years but I love almost every part of the experience.
There was tension. Teachers doing their two years required service were suspicious of Peace Corps teachers, a few assuming we were CIA spies. There were Marxists. There were student strikes.
Tim's book brings back so many memories: the long beautiful yet frightening bus trips along the escarpments, the constant vigilance to not get sick, the small moments (weaver birds! baboons, Colobus monkeys watching the basketball games, children making soccer balls out of old stockings.)
I think the missionary families were brave. Yes, their children had challenges our little neighbor kids don't have, but they did so much good with their medical mission and education of locals in their dresser schools. And they cared very much about their own children, just as my neighbors care about theirs.
Ethiopia is a beautiful and fascinating country. Thank you, Tim, for your wonderful story.

An interesting read for me, as I too had lived and worked in Ethiopia (Years 1968 - 1975). However, the author should have included at least one map of the country, for those people who might not be familiar with Ethiopia and the locations of some of the places that were mentioned.

An engaging, entertaining, and authentic reflection on growing up as a child of missionaries to Africa. These recollections accurately mirror the experiences of those of us who share both the wonders of such a life and the painful losses that come with the fact that you never really, fully "belong" in any one place. Although the details may differ, Tim Bascomb's story binds MK's the world over to him through his honest portrayal of the special growing-up circumstances and experiences that forever set us apart. This book is of particular value to those contemplating a life of service overseas whose families will accompany them. Daniel Coleman's "The Scent of Eucalyptus" is an able complement to this marvelous memoir by his former schoolmate.

I have not read this yet, but have heard about it. We are glad to find any product that can help us understand our children's Ethiopian history and share with them as they get older.

These are the memories of the middle child of a couple who served as missionaries in Ethopia in the 1960's. Tim was 3 years old when he first arrived. The book covers his parents' tours of 5 years, making him 8 years old at the book's end.

It's hard to imagine such an observant 3 year old, but, this is a child living in a highly insecure environment. A perfect metaphor occurs at the start when Tim and his older brother arrive on Ethopian soil and run. Miraculously they stop at the edge of a cliff. They look down and shake from the vision of the drop off. Another missionary sees some baboons and thinks its great fun to scatter them, adding further terror to the boys still standing on the brink.

Just like that missionary who scattered the baboons, other than Mom, who from time to time says "He's too young", the adults seem to be oblivious to the obvious endangerment of the children.

Every time this family got in the Land Rover I choked. Similarly ominous were the times Tim left the campus of his boarding school... a school where the children are shown a secret basement "just in case".

The book gives a good portrait of missionary life and the state of life in these remote outposts at that time. While the author's point is to descibe his life (not elicit sympathy for missiary children), I could not get past the terror these children were exposed to. I would hope that people who contemplate this sort of work, and people who assign them will consider this book. The policy of sending people with such young dependents needs to be reconsidered.

Contrary to what other reviewers read in this book, I found it to be less an account of missionary experience (adequately written or not) than an account of being a very small child who was placed in a constant state of insecurity and anxiety by his parents. This was their choice of life, but they subjected their very young children to the consequences of their adult choices. That they placed their children in such constant disruption and uncertainty seems to me to be irresponsible. It seemed to me that they were very neglectful, selfish and even emotionally abusive. Does having a "calling" or a cause give permission to treat one's children the way that these parents did? The focus of this book was on this little boy's impressions of family, of his own emotional state and a child's perspective of some experiences. As a narrow view of political events or of missionary life affected that child's life, they were included, but it is mainly a story of a neglected, lonely and frightened child kept in persistent anxiety about matters of safety, security and family relationships. I don't know how representative this kind of neglect of missionary children is of missionary life in Africa or anywhere else, or whether it was unique to these two parents, but I found myself annoyed with these parents through much of this reading. It was astonishing to remember that for much of the time written about, this little boy was 3-4-5 years old being sent away to boarding school far away from his parents.