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Running to the Fire: An American Missionary Comes of Age in Revolutionary Ethiopia
In the streets of Addis Ababa in 1977, shop-front posters illustrate Uncle Sam being strangled by an Ethiopian revolutionary, parliamentary leaders are executed, student protesters are gunned down, and Christian mission converts are targeted as imperialistic sympathizers. Into this world arrives sixteen-year-old Tim Bascom, whose missionary parents have brought their family from a small town in Kansas straight into Colonel Mengistu’s Marxist “Red Terror.” Here they plan to work alongside a tiny remnant of western missionaries who trust that God will somehow keep them safe.
Running to the Fire focuses on the turbulent year the Bascom family experienced upon traveling into revolutionary Ethiopia. The teenage Bascom finds a paradoxical exhilaration in living so close to constant danger. At boarding school in Addis Ababa, where dorm parents demand morning devotions and forbid dancing, Bascom bonds with other youth due to a shared sense of threat. He falls in love for the first time, but the young couple is soon separated by the politics that affect all their lives. Across the country, missionaries are being held under house arrest while communist cadres seize their hospitals and schools. A friend’s father is imprisoned as a suspected CIA agent; another is killed by raiding Somalis.
Throughout, the teenaged Bascom struggles with his faith and his role within the conflict as a white American Christian missionary’s child. Reflecting back as an adult, he explores the historical, cultural, and religious contexts that led to this conflict, even though in doing so he is forced to ask himself questions that are easier left alone. Why, he wonders, did he find such strange fulfillment in being young and idealistic in the middle of what was essentially a kind of holy war?
Running to the Fire focuses on the turbulent year the Bascom family experienced upon traveling into revolutionary Ethiopia. The teenage Bascom finds a paradoxical exhilaration in living so close to constant danger. At boarding school in Addis Ababa, where dorm parents demand morning devotions and forbid dancing, Bascom bonds with other youth due to a shared sense of threat. He falls in love for the first time, but the young couple is soon separated by the politics that affect all their lives. Across the country, missionaries are being held under house arrest while communist cadres seize their hospitals and schools. A friend’s father is imprisoned as a suspected CIA agent; another is killed by raiding Somalis.
Throughout, the teenaged Bascom struggles with his faith and his role within the conflict as a white American Christian missionary’s child. Reflecting back as an adult, he explores the historical, cultural, and religious contexts that led to this conflict, even though in doing so he is forced to ask himself questions that are easier left alone. Why, he wonders, did he find such strange fulfillment in being young and idealistic in the middle of what was essentially a kind of holy war?
- GenresAfrica
264 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 9, 2015
This is a well written and honest account of a high school age missionary kid in Ethiopia during its revolution in the 1970s. The author was frank about his moral and philosophical inquiries concerning spiritual, cultural, and political questions raised during that time of his life and even 50 years later. I found the book compelling and unique in that I have not read anything like it before.
October 28, 2018
A memoir that covers a missionary family’s return to Ethiopia timed at the worst possible way because of the revolution brought about in 1977. Tim Bascom does a good job of capturing the real-time fears and drama felt by a teenage boy worried for the safety of his family and “home” in the remote countryside of a war torn country. What I most valued (as an “MK” or missionary kid myself) is the adult version of that boy asking tough questions about whether foreigners have the right to change the local African cultures and whether missionaries are truly serving the real needs of the local people or bragging about their sacrifices. I don’t have any answers but I applaud the author for raising these concerns.
February 10, 2020
A deep look into Ethiopia's past and a teenager's formation within it
Masterfully written with layers of life in varying realms. More than an autobiography, more than a story, more than personal reflection about historical happenings within the parentheses of mission involvement. The beauty is the complexity of a life lived interculturally, sometimes on the edge of fear...a wealth of soul gained through the fury of flames.
October 15, 2017
Follow-up to Chameleon Days brings the author and his family back to Ethiopia, but it's a different place now -- in the midst of civil war, a dangerous place for Americans. Lets Bascom ponder the nature of war, and look at his own life from both an adult perspective and the perspective of the teen-ager he was at the time the book is set.
October 13, 2016
Tim Bascom has written one of the most honest, transparent memoirs I've read in some time. It is aided by the fact that Bascom is reflecting on some of the most significant years of his life from the vantage of adulthood. Nevertheless, he is quick to admit that some of the same doubts about life and faith that plagued him while coming of age in revolutionary Ethiopia still trouble him today.
Bascom's parents were medical missionaries to eastern Africa. They served a second stint in Ethiopia in the mid-1970s during the Marxist Revolution. At the time, young Bascom was a teenager coming to grips with his own manhood, his parents seeming dangerous devotion to the Great Commission, and the ever present fear of violence while living in a country in the midst of a revolution.
One of the more interesting aspects of Bascom's reflections on the missionary experience is his critique of Western Christianity's tendency to ally itself with regimes that permit the "progress" that Christian missionary efforts introduce to impoverished areas in education and health. But hidden from public view, certain elements of the society are oppressed. Such was the case in Emperor Haile Selassie's Ethiopia. While Selassie was held up in Christian circles as a kindly, progresssive monarch, he was ineffective or unwilling to curb the abuse of Muslims or deal with a prolonged famine in the north and chronic unemployment. All of which laid the ground for the Marxist Revolution in the 1970s--and Bascom's occasional disillusionment with Christianity.
What made this book even more enjoyable for me was meeting the author and hearing him speak about his approach to memoir writing. It's Bascom's ability and willingness to put his honest introspection out there for the reader that makes this such a delightful memoir. Highly recommend.
Bascom's parents were medical missionaries to eastern Africa. They served a second stint in Ethiopia in the mid-1970s during the Marxist Revolution. At the time, young Bascom was a teenager coming to grips with his own manhood, his parents seeming dangerous devotion to the Great Commission, and the ever present fear of violence while living in a country in the midst of a revolution.
One of the more interesting aspects of Bascom's reflections on the missionary experience is his critique of Western Christianity's tendency to ally itself with regimes that permit the "progress" that Christian missionary efforts introduce to impoverished areas in education and health. But hidden from public view, certain elements of the society are oppressed. Such was the case in Emperor Haile Selassie's Ethiopia. While Selassie was held up in Christian circles as a kindly, progresssive monarch, he was ineffective or unwilling to curb the abuse of Muslims or deal with a prolonged famine in the north and chronic unemployment. All of which laid the ground for the Marxist Revolution in the 1970s--and Bascom's occasional disillusionment with Christianity.
What made this book even more enjoyable for me was meeting the author and hearing him speak about his approach to memoir writing. It's Bascom's ability and willingness to put his honest introspection out there for the reader that makes this such a delightful memoir. Highly recommend.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews