About this item
Some were paid. Some felt compelled by a duty to God. Some volunteered. Some died doing it. All flew on rickety old aircraft into a nighttime, wartime patch of African forest called Biafra. Far Away in the Sky gives the personal account of one of them, a young American volunteer who joined the largest civilian humanitarian relief airlift ever attempted. In 1968 millions of people, mostly children, were starving due to a military blockade of Biafra, the former Eastern Region of Nigeria. The World Council of Churches and Caritas International mounted a relief airlift. Flying at night to avoid Nigerian MiGs, without radar or any modern navigational aids, landing amid bombs on a stretch of road in the rain forest, the old planes delivered thousands of tons of food and medicines.
About the Author
My mother told me to write this book. She is 95 years old, and she handed me a bundle of letters that I had sent her from Africa 50 years ago. She said, "You write very well, and you need to tell this story." I served in the United States Peace Corps in Nigeria in 1964, 1965, and 1966, and I wrote home about it. Since we had no instantaneous electronic communications back then, letters contained a lot of detail and feeling.
In 1968 I went back there to my one-time home in Eastern Nigeria-then called Biafra-because a war had broken out. People were starving by the millions. International church groups started a massive humanitarian airlift of food and medicine. UNICEF recruited me to help unload the planes in Biafra. Again, I wrote letters home, but I also made dozens of audio tapes with amazing detail, capturing the history of that time.
I still have the tapes and the letters my mother gave me and my pictures and many documents from the airlift. From them I wrote the book, "Far Away in the Sky."
Out of great respect, I wrote it for my mother.
