In this autobiographical book, the author gives an informative and lively account of the first eight years of his and his family's living and serving in pre-revolutionary feudal Ethiopia. It is a story of adventure as a novice missionary couple learns and adapts to a vastly different culture while raising a family in the less developed hinterlands.
The events take place from 1967 to 1975, a pivotal time in Ethiopia's history; a time marked by growing discontent with feudalism and the ancient imperial regime that supported it. It was a time of growing turmoil that, in the midst of drought and famine, spilled over into an armed revolution; a time when ignorant men with guns over-powered the best minds and forced a tradition-bound society to join in a bloody experiment with radical socialism.
It was a time when the slow and difficult years of missionary effort in planting the seeds of the Christian gospel began to sprout and take root and grow into what would become a mighty movement of transformation in that society.