In 1953, when Dorothy Stephens and her husband lived in married student housing at the University of Michigan, she never imagined that four years later she would be living in Kenya toward the end of the Mau Mau rebellion. Plunged into a world of exotic sights, sounds, and people, she would face safari ants, wild bees, and a vicious monkey, and in meeting unexpected challenges, would discover a core of strength deep in her security-loving soul.Her book takes you to Kenya during its last tumultuous days as a British colony, when it rode the wave of change sweeping across Africa.

 

Witness the transformative effect on her life of these two years in Kenya. Meet the emerging young leaders of the independence movement and the fascinating women who became her friends. And imagine her astonishment at being invited to meet the Queen Mother of England.Travel with her to Murchison Falls in Uganda, where the entire Nile River squeezes through a narrow cleft in the rocks and thunders over a precipice into the water far below. Meander through Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, in the days before there were roads, when the infrequent tourists in their four-wheel drives wandered across the plains among herds of wildebeeste, zebra, and antelopes, with occasional sightings of the Big Five: lion, elephant, buffalo, rhino, and leopard.Lastly, accompany her on a three-hundred-mile trip to the Kenya coast. Alone with her young house servant and three children, she drove through untamed bush inhabited by the same Big Five, a trip that would prove to be a powerful and life-changing experience.

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Click here to read the first chapter.