Going For Balm In Gilead
Samuel was born in an African village, where the ancestors used to depend on natural indicators to predict the start of seasonal rains. Lately, the indicators had become unreliable, and when the community failed to predict the onset of rains, crops failed, and the threat of famine loomed large on the horizon. Samuel was blamed because he had passed on information about the rains, which turned out to be wrong. Assisted by an enigmatic village pastor, Samuel escaped to the city before society could exact its retribution. Enticed by the prospects of better income abroad, Samuel crossed the Mediterranean Sea illegally, to settle in Gilead in Europe. Unfortunately, life in Gilead did not turn out as he had envisaged. This book chronicles Samuel’s struggle to achieve success. It tells the story of how he had to straddle two parallel worlds of existence, and the ultimate discovery that because he had become exotic in both worlds, ‘home’ was nowhere. This is Samuel’s story of how he ultimately discovers that the secret of success lay in self-reconciliation, and that at the heart of this, was the definition of ‘home.’
About the Author
Born in 1965, Mazs M. Yebbus is a Norwegian scientist with roots in Africa. In 2000, he received a PhD from the University of Bergen in Norway for his thesis on “Regularizing the Volterra Integral Equation of the First Kind.” In 2017, Yebbus was awarded the 2017-2018 Fulbright Scholarship as a visiting professor at Cornell University, USA. In his leisure time, Yebbus plays soccer, squash, and enjoys outdoor life—namely cross-country skiing and hill walking. He finds pleasure in writing poems and fiction, and working as an executive board member for the Trax Norway Charity.
Published: 2018
Page Count: 308