Why would a single woman leave her comfortable life in North Chicago to settle in a Sub-Saharan East African country, within a culture and among a people so different from all that is familiar? Janice Lever did, and her whopping memoir, Bye, Mzungu!, based on journal entries written the first several of her eighteen year odyssey in East Africa, tells all about it. Receiving assurance of a job awaiting her in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1987, Lever arrives there only to find that the promised job isn't waiting after all. A series of surprising turn-of-events takes her, instead, to Kenya's western neighbor, Uganda. Uganda--brought to the world's attention through the often brutal and chaotic misrule of Idi Amin during the 1970s and again in the twenty-first century because of a savage rebel group called, "Lord's Resistance Army" on Uganda's northern border which for two decades has abducted upwards of a thousand young women and children to service its soldiers as slave workers. But this is not the Uganda Lever experiences. Her well-written, interesting, and informative book tells of another Uganda--one made up of individual Ugandans of her personal experience; of surprise and humanity, intelligence and grit. Her descriptions are so vivid that they leave the reader feeling as if they have traveled to Africa. She has a knack for storytelling, and readers are sure to find themselves invested in the people and the places she writes about. Her honest portrayal of both herself and the people and the places she encounters is refreshing. The points she makes about race relations and the disparities between those who grow up privileged and those who do not will spark some serious thought. Lever explains in the book's Foreword that the challenge in writing her story "lay not in recounting the multiple and strange incidents that befell the newcomer in a strange land; these were minutely detailed in my journal." The challenge lay rather in working through the tests and life lessons she learned that were to influence her thinking about the world and her own place in it. Integrating these into the narrative proved to be the more difficult writing task. "I have often been asked why I went to Africa in the first place. I don't really understand my motives for going, except that it seemed the right thing to do at the time. There was an adventure waiting, and I was pulled into it." Lever's adventure, recounted in Bye, Mzungu! is, for the reader, both uplifting and inspiring.
About the Author: Janice Lever was a naive traveler when she set out for East Africa in 1987--a step that was to lead to eighteen years of adventure. It's a story she thinks worth sharing with others, especially those with hearts and minds curious about the "mother of all continents" and those who are open to the idea of setting out for foreign fields.