How many parents does it take to raise a child?
A childhood in Africa gave Nancy Henderson-James much to contemplate, in relation to family, the world, and how she wants to live her life. She has written two books about the experience and her essays have appeared in Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global and Writing Out of Limbo: International Childhoods, Global Nomads and Third Culture Kids. She was a school librarian for thirty years and has lived in Durham, North Carolina for most of her adult life.
Books
All My Parents: Seeking a Sense of Self in Family draws on Nancy Henderson-James’s childhood to contemplate the impact her many parents had on her development and her relationship to family. Beginning with her own parents and grandparents, she then considers her surrogate parents and her two sets of in-laws. She reflects on being a parent herself and finds that her sons often taught her how to be a mother. Tending to her parents in their last years, a return to Angola after an absence of forty-four years, and the arrival of four grandchildren remind her of how full life can be. Winner of two 2021 Bronze Reader Views Reviewers Choice Awards in Parenting/Family Relations and in Memoir/Biography/Autobiography.
At Home Abroad: An American Girl in Africa focuses on Nancy Henderson-James’s African childhood and the pivotal experiences of living away from home in dorms and with surrogate families. The return to her parents’ home country of the United States at sixteen brought culture shock and a sense of loss, but exploring the 1960s movements for women’s liberation and civil rights, and anti-war activity gave her a way to feel at home in America. Winner of the 2010 Reader Views Reviewers Choice Award in Memoir
Umbundu Proverb
Nda endele-e-e-e, ndi tãi.
Não tenho pressa de ir onde só há estranhos!
I’m not in a hurry to go where there are only strangers!