David L. Koren

My mother told me to write this book. She is 95 years old, and she handed me a bundle of letters that I had sent her from Africa 50 years ago. She said, "You write very well, and you need to tell this story." I served in the United States Peace Corps in Nigeria in 1964, 1965, and 1966, and I wrote home about it. Since we had no instantaneous electronic communications back then, letters contained a lot of detail and feeling.

In 1968 I went back there to my one-time home in Eastern Nigeria-then called Biafra-because a war had broken out. People were starving by the millions. International church groups started a massive humanitarian airlift of food and medicine. UNICEF recruited me to help unload the planes in Biafra. Again, I wrote letters home, but I also made dozens of audio tapes with amazing detail, capturing the history of that time.

I still have the tapes and the letters my mother gave me and my pictures and many documents from the airlift. From them I wrote the book, "Far Away in the Sky."

Out of great respect, I wrote it for my mother.