The Unchosen Road... ...To the Deep Well and Back Again

‘The Unchosen Road. . . . . . To the Deep Well and Back Again’ is the true account of a family going to Africa, in 1955, to serve as missionaries in the south Sudan, shared through the eyes of an adolescent girl. It is a time of political unrest between the north and south Sudan. At this time, the mother gets sick and with the inability to travel south to their intended place of service, the family travels north to Assiut, Egypt where there is a mission hospital for better health care for the mother and a mission boarding school for the young girl and her brother to attend. The mother dies and, in her honor, the father returns to the Sudan to start his work.

After the school year, the children travel the 1,700 miles to spend the summer with their father before heading to Egypt again in the fall for school. The school has moved to Alexandria, Egypt on the Mediterranean Sea.

After only a month and a half, a war, the Suez Crisis, breaks out in Egypt. Amid bombing and chaos, the children clandestinely travel to the Sudan where the father is. They remain and get farmed out to various families for schooling for the remainder of the year. Each summer the children leave school to return to the Sudan, and later Ethiopia, to spend the summer with their father and his new wife.

The family lives through many experiences, both enriching and heart-wrenching and these are shared with beauty, honesty and an ability to see an unconventional life through the eyes of an unwavering faith.

 Pam Turner, in her early childhood, lived between Oxford, Ohio where her father worked in an aeronautical firm in the winter and Cook, Minnesota, Lake Vermilion where her parents owned and operated a resort during the summer.

When Pam was eleven, her parents went to Africa as missionaries. This began a more nomadic life since her father was a builder having to move from station to station building schools, churches, and missionary residences.

Pam is married to husband, Jim, has two grown children, four grandchildren and one great grandchild. She resides in Hutchinson, Kansas.