When This Is Over, I Will Go To School, And I Will Learn To Read

The author/protagonist is a veteran traveler, lover of adventure, seeker of truth, wife and mother. She is an author who spent her early years sailing an old Tall Ship around the world, only to sink, survive, be proposed to in a hopelessly adrift life raft, and then be miraculously saved - the subject of her first book Sailing To The Far Horizon.
Although it had been a few years since her last great independent wanders, being out in the world again and discovering if she was still able to handle it finally became a craving too palpable to ignore. In her more recent travels, however, the author not only confronts the challenge to do well but also the desire to do good. The Dark Continent does not merely call to her it batter-rams her entire consciousness. Prior to acknowledging her gullibility in jimmying open and jamming her foot through proverbial closed doors so that she is permitted to risk such questionable endeavors, the author lays bare her initial naïve expectations. She then details the curious process by which she is required to prepare for her hazardous journeys. In the end her impressions, rife with their associated political and social revelations and disenchantments, are shamelessly and often humorously exposed. The whole unvarnished truth that is revealed becomes the gritty gist of her tales. The author has spent over half a century questioning authority, countering cultural mores, challenging establishments and having leaps-of-faith adventures. Her writing is the product of this journey. She has embraced her world with arms, eyes, heart and mind wide open, and has been richly rewarded for her risk-taking but often also made to pay a heavy price. Therein lies the guts of her story-telling; shocking, human, hilarious, heartbreaking, always informed, first person true, and brutally honest.