Tribal Origins - Softcover

Peter Parr

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9966720480 ISBN 13: 9789966720481

Publisher: Old Africa books, 2011

Synopsis

TRIBAL ORIGINS is the true story of a boy from a traditional Minnesotan family whose parents are called to Africa in the 1950s to become missionaries. They depart from their Minnesota island home in the summer of 1955, leaving friends and family, and travel overland to Africa, to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. While in Khartoum the mother contracts a deadly disease forcing the family to backtrack to Egypt for medical help. Despite the death of his wife, the father returns to the Sudan to carry out his new life s work and to make sense of his wife s death. The children are put into a boarding school. After one year at the boarding school in upper Egypt the children are sent home to the south Sudan to see their father. The father is immersed in becoming a missionary. Little do the children understand that they we have come to Africa during interesting times. They are living through the change of an era from colonial rule to national independence. The boarding school where Parr and his sister go to school moves to cosmopolitan Alexandria on the Mediterranean with its remnants of the Ottoman empire - the age of Europe-on-the-Nile. Alexandria is part-Europe, part-Middle East, part-Africa, part-Moslem, and part-Christian all of which profoundly influence Parr s growing up. Every summer the children leave Egypt and return home to the bush to see their parents. Throughout his growing up Parr is haunted by the memories of the death of my mother. Why God abandoned her. And why his father, such a tower of strength, could not save her.

About this title

About the Author

Parr was born in northern Minnesota on the Iron Range. As a child he went with his family in 1955 to Africa during the transition period from colonial rule to national independence. The family arrived in the Sudan in 1955 during the turbulent period prior to Sudan s independence from Anglo-Egyptian dominance. As the south Sudan erupted into brutal civil war the family fled across the border into Ethiopia. In Ethiopia they lived the same endless nomadic life in southwest Ethiopia moving from one station to another. Parr holds a BA degree in English Literature from the College of Wooster, Ohio, and a Masters Diploma in Development Administration from the University of Birmingham s School of Local Government, England. After college Parr returned to southwest Ethiopia where he and his wife worked in Gambella as volunteers on a refugee program. Later they moved to Surma, deep into the bush, to help friends build a mission station amongst the Surma tribe. Two of Parr s four children were born in Ethiopia and Kenya. Parr has worked long-term in Afghanistan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Poland, Senegal, Somalia, the Sudan, South Africa, and Tunisia. In 2007 Parr become the US Peace Corps country director for Ethiopia. Parr currently lives in South Africa and makes frequent trips back to the northern Minnesota island to see his family and grown children.

About this edition

• Publisher: Old Africa books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 9966720480
• ISBN 13: 9789966720481
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 395
• Editor: Shel Arensen
• Illustrator: Blake Arensen