Book Summary: Everybody needs to run away from home at least once. Susan Corbett told people she was out to save the world, but really she was running--running from her home as much as to anywhere. Like many women, she was searching for meaning to her life or for a good man to share it with. In Africa, she hoped to find both.
Compelling and compassionate, In the Belly of the Elephant is Susan's transformative story of what happens when you decide to try to achieve world peace while searching for a good man. More than a fish-out-of-water story, it's a surprising and heart-rending account of her time in Africa trying to change the world as she battles heat, sandstorms, drought, riots, intestinal bugs, burnout, love affairs and more than one meeting with death. Against a backdrop of vivid beauty and culture, in a narrative interwoven with a rich tapestry of African myths and fables, Susan learns the true simplicity of life, and discovers people full of kindness, wisdom and resilience, and shares with us lessons we, too, can learn from her experiences.
My Rating/Review: 3/5 stars. What I liked: This was a fascinating personal story about one woman's desire to find a place for herself in the world. Raised in a conservative (Catholic and Mormon) family in rural Idaho, the author decided to join the Peace Corps and worked overseas in Africa. This book covers the course of 2 of those years overseas. During her time as a relief worker, she comes to know (and love like family) the people in the small town she is based in. Her descriptions of her fellow aid workers, the villagers, the landscape that is her part of Africa were wonderful, and I appreciated that she pulled in more of the unrest and war that was happening in Africa in the mid-90s (especially in Somalia) without bashing you over the head with it. What I didn't like: All very well and good that she was "looking for a good man", but there was a bit more navel gazing about this topic than I really needed to hear. For me, it kept being an interruption of the rest of the storyline, which I very much wanted to read more about, and by the end of the book, I found it disruptive enough I skimmed over those parts to get back to hearing about her trip to Kenya, and whether or not the local weaver's guild was able to repay their thread loans at the end of the year.
I am glad I picked up this book and read it. It's outside my normal go-to kind of reading, which, for me, is all about why I do this yearly reading challenge. It's not one I would put on a permanent bookshelf and go back and read again, but I am glad I read it, which I suppose is a recommendation to some extent in and of itself. I also really enjoyed how the author interwove traditional African folklore with her own personal journey (the title refers to one of these tales) - a nice addition to her own personal tale of growth and personal development.
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