Nine Hills to Nambonkaha by Sarah Erdman

Sometimes I'm sorely disappointed when I read a Peace Corps memoir because it is all about the person and includes little to no information about the place and people they volunteered with.  This one is vastly different from that.  Erdman tells little of herself but instead opens up the village of Nambonkaha to you and introduces you to some of its people.

Erdman is selected to be a health worker in the village of Nambonkaha as her Peace Corps assignment.  For two years, she will work to bring better practices to the village and improve health there.  She chooses to do this through the women of the village by introducing baby weighings and vaccination programs.  She also focuses on AIDS education.  But she just introduces and actually uses the villagers to enact the change on the village and uses a variety of local people to accomplish these tasks.

I actually still don't feel as if I know much about Erdman.  Well, aside from the fact that she did a good job as a volunteer.  I know more about her village.  Because those are the people she described in the book.  You feel as if you especially know the ones she was close with.  The boys she taught to read, the women she interacted with on a daily basis, the nurse she worked with at the clinic.  All of these people she described the good and bad on (although mostly good) and took great care to outline their personalities.  It's what made this book worth reading.  Because she took the time to know who she was working with rather than focusing on herself.  And she is very non-judgemental, despite the practices that she abhors and witnesses.

That being said, this book is a long read because it is very detailed.  While I enjoyed getting to know all the aspects of village life and the challenges there were to overcome in the education of healthcare, I felt as if things were very repetitive and drawn out.  It was helpful that there was a glossary at the end for some of the translations and words specific to the village.  There were several times I had to look up just what an object was so I could understand it in context.  I also would have loved to see some pictures of the village and its people, so I could put faces to names.

If you enjoy Peace Corps memoirs or travel writing I think this will be a very good book to read.  It details the experience, not the person writing it, and is one of the more honest accounts I've seen.

Nine Hills to Nambonkaha
Copyright 2003
322 pages

Daughters Who Walk This Path by Yejide Kilanko

**This book was received through the Amazon Vine program**

What a sad, yet hopeful book. Daughters Who Walk This Path opens up not only a culture, but a topic that focuses on abuse in the home and how sometimes the ones that hurt us most are those known to us.

Morayo is a young girl growing up in Nigeria. The older sister, she feels a sense of responsibility to her younger sister, most especially because her younger sister is an albino and considered unlucky in their culture. But when she's looking out for her sister, no-one is looking out for her and a cousin who has come to stay forces her to do unspeakable things. And the aftermath of that will follow her for many years as she struggles to believe in herself again.

Morayo is a fantastic character. She grows, she has troubles, but overall, she is very real. The pain that she goes through is heartbreaking, and I will admit that I shed a few tears while reading about her plight. And the reactions to her troubles are heartbreaking as well. Reading about her loneliness and the denial that her family seemed to go through was tough, but yet oh so true when you look at real life abuse statistics anywhere in the world. I did think her sister could have been a better character. She almost doesn't seem needed, and very rarely adds to the plot. Morayo's aunts add more insight and development to the book than she does. And given that she has her own troubles with being an albino, I think she really could have been used better in the story.

Abuse is a hard subject to talk about. Especially since often times it is someone the person is close to instead of a complete stranger. And the awkwardness it makes between family members just further hurts the victim. I think that Kilanko did a great job with showing how the events in her childhood shaped Morayo's adult life and made her make the choices that she did. And while all this was going on she even managed to share a little bit about how schooling and university works in Nigeria, which I thought interesting. The only part I didn't really care for was the chapter in which she tried to dive into the political realm. It just felt out of place and didn't flow as nice with the rest of the book.

I think this is a very interesting book and while it's sad, it also is a little uplifting because it proves that the human spirit can get through some terrible things. This is one that's well worth reading.

Daughters Who Walk This Path
Copyright 2013
329 pages

Hearts on Fire by Jill Iscol and Peter W. Cookson Jr.

**This review is part of the Amazon Vine Program**

I love the idea of this book but wasn't as fond of the execution. Any book about people out there doing good is sure to draw me in, and it doesn't take much to keep me hooked, but this one I had some trouble with.

Hearts on Fire takes the stories of fourteen different people (three are combined into one story) and tells what they are doing to change the world. It ranges from working in the medical field, helping provide education in the prison system, to many other acts of charity and volunteerism and organizations that the people interviewed are either in or have founded. It starts with an overview of what the person is doing, and then allows the person to tell you what their inspiration is in their own words.

I didn't really feel connected to any of the people in this book. They are all doing amazing things but it was kind of lost in translation. Some of the people weren't native speakers of English so their narratives were rambling and hard to see the real person in them. Still, they are all doing wonderful things and are very inspirational in that they want to help people. It was the total theme across the book and all of these people must be wonderful and caring to do what they do. I'm sure it was tough to just pick out the few that were in this book with all the other people doing amazing things in the world.

The format of the book is what made it tough. As said before, the visionaries parts, in their own words, were rambling and hard to follow and at times I was confused as to what they were actually doing to help people. If it weren't for the short introduction at the beginning of each chapter I would have been completely lost. The introductions were extremely well written and a pleasure to read. And each chapter was so short. This is a brief book to begin with, but I would have loved to learn more about each charity and each person and more on their goal in general. I did appreciate the links to the different charities and sites related to the person's goals at the end of each chapter. It was a way to do more research and I learned about some charities I'd never even heard of before. And there were plenty of nice pictures so you could see the people they were talking about and maps of the different regions they worked in.

This was an interesting book and it had a lot of good points, but I wish it was more reader friendly. It could do a lot more for the causes if it were a more engaging book. But for those that love to read about people making a difference, it will still be a good read.

Hearts on Fire
Copyright 2012
137 pages

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

This book is one I've kind of sat and thought about for awhile.  Which usually means good things about a book.  And normally it does, but I bounced back and forth between liking this book and not caring for it at all.  But I think it had more to do with the writing than the subject matter for the most part.

When a brash commanding Reverend decides that he needs to be a Missionary, he forces his four children and wife to move out to the Congo with him where he starts preaching at the local people and expecting them to conform to his will.  There they must struggle to live in a way they are unaccustomed. to until something tragic happens.  And this tragedy will effect each of them in a different way and have them choose different courses for their lives.

Obviously, the father Nathan, is not a sympathetic character in this book.  The other characters can't stand him and he is portrayed as a tyrant.  But Kingsolver is also careful to throw in the bit about him being injured in the army in there.  It's well known that soldiers don't always come back the same person they left as in a war and it's quite a possibility that Nathan was changed in a way.  So it leaves it to the reader to see whether or not he actually is a sympathetic character when weighing everything that has happened to him.  The mother, Orleanna, I can't say I thought about much one way or the other.  She was squashed down by Nathan and I dare say it left her with her own world in her head.  Sure she took care of her kids, but there had to be some sort of escape for her and she does fade in and out in the book.  The daughters were all distinct although you had to like some more than others.  Rachel was too prissy and probably not a favorite of anyone.  Adah was strange and hard to connect to, although she got better as the book progressed.  Leah was probably the easiest character to become connected to, as she wanted to stand up for what she believed as right.  And Ruth May is a young child filled with curiosity.

There is a definitely stance on what Kingsolver believes in this book.  Her view on politics and Africa is expressly stated through the actions of her characters.  And she sheds a very sympathetic eye on the plight of Africa itself and a not so sympathetic tone with the foreign countries who mingle their affairs with it.  And it would appear that she had to have had a bad experience with a reverend or missionary with the true terror she makes Nathan.  Although there is a good missionary that appears in the book now and then.  The writing itself is what I had trouble with.  Kingsolver has a very poetic, descriptive way of writing and that's not the problem.  The problem is that there is just way too much of it in this book.  It could have easily been half this size and still told a good story.  But after awhile I had to put the book down just to take a break because it seemed repetitive.  And I enjoyed the latter half with the girls grown up than the previous half that detailed their first year in the Congo.  It was just too slow paced for me.

An interesting book and definitely one that you could tell the author did her research on.  I don't know much about the politics of the Congo/Zaire itself, but I'd hazard to guess that Kingsolver probably did adequate research there as well.  I think I still prefer her non-fiction though and would give this book a solid 3.5 stars.

The Poisonwood Bible
Copyright 1998
543 pages