This story, a memoir, delves into the mind and heart of a little girl who lived in two different worlds - one, of her white-skinned privileged American missionary parents, and the other, of the brown-skinned Indian people in whose country they lived and worked, and into which she was born. The missionary lifestyle and the work of her parents are described through the eyes of the author, who spent all but 3 years of her childhood in India when it was still under British rule. In her first five years she survived life-threatening tropical diseases only to be exposed to the dangers of warfare on the seas when she, along with her parents and siblings, fled India and returned to America during World War II. Living in America for three years opened up yet another world for this young girl - a world filled with wonderment and excitement, a world where her relatives lived and the place where many happy memories were created. But once back in India, America became a distant memory, a place she would not return to until she was sixteen years old. For those intervening years she was to experience yet another world - boarding school, 1,100 miles away from her parents. Separations from her family during these formative years challenged the author to draw on her own resources. It was in boarding school that she explored more than just books . . . Take a journey into all the different worlds of this extraordinary childhood!
This story, a memoir, delves into the mind and heart of a little girl who lived in two different worlds - one, of her white-skinned privileged American missionary parents, and the other, of the brown-skinned Indian people in whose country they lived and worked, and into which she was born. The missionary lifestyle and the work of her parents are described through the eyes of the author, who spent all but 3 years of her childhood in India when it was still under British rule. In her first five years she survived life-threatening tropical diseases only to be exposed to the dangers of warfare on the seas when she, along with her parents and siblings, fled India and returned to America during World War II. Living in America for three years opened up yet another world for this young girl - a world filled with wonderment and excitement, a world where her relatives lived and the place where many happy memories were created. But once back in India, America became a distant memory, a place she would not return to until she was sixteen years old. For those intervening years she was to experience yet another world - boarding school, 1,100 miles away from her parents. Separations from her family during these formative years challenged the author to draw on her own resources. It was in boarding school that she explored more than just books . . . Take a journey into all the different worlds of this extraordinary childhood!