In 1977, Idi Amin placed all Americans in Uganda under house arrest. My sister Sonja and I were among the 240 missionaries, aid workers, pilots, and engineers still in the country and probably the youngest without an American guardian. Our father was in Kenya on church business, and our mother, a Finn, wasn’t a U.S. citizen. When a soldier came to inventory our American belongings, my mother claimed each item as her own.
Twenty-five years later, I sat in an attic in Finland and held a stack of aerogrammes in my hand, staring at my mother’s handwriting, both familiar and strange. The letters whispered their urgent message, “We are still here.” My mother had died several years earlier with a swiftness that still left me untethered. Who was this woman? And what did these letters say?
Praise for Wait for God to Notice
”It is so rare to find a book as generous in spirit as Sari Fordham’s Wait for God to Notice. Fordham’s portrait of her childhood in Uganda, growing up in a missionary family during the time of Idi Amin, is sometimes harrowing, sometimes funny, and sometimes beautifully sad. Her love for East Africa and for her stubbornly remarkable parents will make you want to buy one copy of this exquisite memoir for yourself, and a few for your friends.”
Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members and The Shakespeare Requirement
“The missionary experience occupies a fraught corner of contemporary memoir. Sari Fordham approaches it simply as a girl, growing up in a faraway land. She doesn’t celebrate the mission so much as her memories of family and home in a place that, as she notes, was never really theirs. The specter of Idi Amin casts the decency of the Fordhams and their Ugandan hosts in sharp relief―we root for them, and especially for this storyteller.”
Ted Conover, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing
”This gripping, astutely written memoir of adventures and misadventures is also a very moving story of a mother-daughter relationship. One cannot help admiring the heroic stubbornness and resiliency of this naive, idealistic clan of missionaries, as they adjust to near-impossible circumstances presided over by mad tyrant Idi Amin.
Phillip Lopate, A Mother’s Tale
I fell in love with the author’s family and with the wide-eyed, outsider children she and her sister were. Fordham’s writing is funny, affectionate, wise, and socially aware, and I didn’t want this beautifully-written book to end.”
Andria Williams, The Longest Night
“Missionaries, even with the best intentions, don’t quite know what they’re getting themselves into. Especially in Uganda under the reign of Idi Amin. Food is scarce. Driver ants and snakes are omnipresent. Ordinary errands mean dealing with blockades, bribes, and sometimes terror. Sari Fordham has written a memoir of a family both innocent and brave. Written with compassion, humor and a healthy dollop of skepticism, Fordham creates a world as vibrant and alive as Africa itself. A truly compelling read.”
Fern Kupfer, Leaving Long Island
”Sari Fordham’s Wait for God to Notice is both a story of a young girl and her missionary family’s life in Uganda in the 1970s among political unrest, and a meditation on landscape; of how our love is made from the stuff of the places in which we grow. Most deeply and poignantly, however, this is a daughter’s address to her mother, upon whom the memoir focuses most of all, and speaks to, and loves. I enjoyed this book immensely. It is lucid, careful, expressive, and wryly funny, and searchingly emotive without being sentimental. Sari Fordham takes her time―there is wisdom and authority here. Wait for God to Notice is a unique, pleasurable, heartbreaking read.”
Amanda Coplin, The Orchardist