October 2021 Book Club, "A Road Called Down On Both Sides" by Carolyn Kurtz

Winner of the Presbyterian Writers Guild’s Best First Book Award Coming of age in 1950s Ethiopia, American Caroline Kurtz returns as an adult with spouse and family, searching for "home.”

Caroline Kurtz grew up in the remote mountains of Maji, Ethiopia in the 1950s. Inside her mud adobe home with her missionary parents and three sisters, she enjoyed American family life. Outside, her world was shaped by drums and the joy cry; Jeep and mule treks into the countryside; ostriches on the air strip; and the crackle of several Ethiopian languages she barely understood but longed to learn.

She felt she’d been exiled to a foreign country when she went to Illinois for college. She returned to Ethiopia to teach, only to discover how complex working in another culture and language really is. Life under a Communist dictatorship meant constant outages―water, electricity, sugar, even toilet paper. But she was willing…