Tribal Origins

TRIBAL ORIGINS is the true story of a boy from a traditional Minnesotan family whose parents are called to Africa in the 1950s to become missionaries. They depart from their Minnesota island home in the summer of 1955, leaving friends and family, and travel overland to Africa, to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. While in Khartoum the mother contracts a deadly disease forcing the family to backtrack to Egypt for medical help. Despite the death of his wife, the father returns to the Sudan to carry out his new life s work and to make sense of his wife s death. The children are put into a boarding school. After one year at the boarding school in upper Egypt the children are sent home to the south Sudan to see their father. The father is immersed in becoming a missionary. Little do the children understand that they we have come to Africa during interesting times. They are living through the change of an era from colonial rule to national independence. The boarding school where Parr and his sister go to school moves to cosmopolitan Alexandria on the Mediterranean with its remnants of the Ottoman empire - the age of Europe-on-the-Nile. Alexandria is part-Europe, part-Middle East, part-Africa, part-Moslem, and part-Christian all of which profoundly influence Parr s growing up. Every summer the children leave Egypt and return home to the bush to see their parents. Throughout his growing up Parr is haunted by the memories of the death of my mother. Why God abandoned her. And why his father, such a tower of strength, could not save her.