Book Beginnings - The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism by Holly Berkley Fletcher
A longtime favorite book blog and Instagram account is Rose City Reader by Gilion Dumas.
Gilion hosts Book Beginnings on Fridays "where participants share the opening sentence (or two) from the book they are reading."
This summer my cousin's wife recommended a new book, The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism by Holly Berkley Fletcher (affiliate link). I submitted a request to the library. Happily, they agreed to purchase the book for their collection!
Here is the first line:
George was six when his parents put him on a ship, alone, bound for the United States from Burma.
By the time my missionary parents sent me to boarding school at age six, almost 140 years later, the school was located in the same country they lived, at least. It was founded in 1925 in the northwest corner of Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) so that foreign missionaries would not need to send their children back to North America or Great Britain for their education.
Travel within the country and from bordering Congo (Zaire) and Angola was still difficult, so there were two terms of four-and-a-half months (18 weeks) each per year. That meant parents only needed to make the long journey to and from the school four times a year.
I am looking forward to reading this book by Holly Berkley Fletcher, a fellow MK (missionary kid) who attended boarding school in Kenya. She has a PhD in American history and also worked for the CIA. She publishes a newsletter on Substack, A Zebra Without Stripes.
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