Chameleon Days: An American Boyhood in Ethiopia

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 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.

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!

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