Into Abyssinia

About the Book

In this autobiographical book, the author gives an informative and lively account of the first eight years of his and his family's living and serving in pre-revolutionary feudal Ethiopia. It is a story of adventure as a novice missionary couple learns and adapts to a vastly different culture while raising a family in the less developed hinterlands.
The events take place from 1967 to 1975, a pivotal time in Ethiopia’s history; a time marked by growing discontent with feudalism and the ancient imperial regime that supported it. It was a time of growing turmoil that, in the midst of drought and famine, spilled over into an armed revolution; a time when ignorant men with guns over-powered the best minds and forced a tradition-bound society to join in a bloody experiment with radical socialism.
It was a time when the slow and difficult years of missionary effort in planting the seeds of the Christian gospel began to sprout and take root and grow into what would become a mighty movement of transformation in that society.

About the Author

Carl Edward Hansen was born and raised in rural Alberta and Ontario, Canada. He holds a BA degree (1965) from Eastern Mennonite College in Virginia, and graduate degrees from Goshen Biblical Seminary (M. Div., 1971) in Indiana, and Fuller Theological Seminary (Th.M., 1985) in California. He was united in marriage with Vera Dorothy King in 1964. Together they served as missionaries in eastern Africa for more than thirty-two years.
Carl served, first as a high school teacher at the Nazareth Bible Academy from 1967 to 1970, and then as director of a development project in Ethiopia from 1972 to 1975. Between 1975 and 1984, Carl served as a pastor in Alberta. Carl and Vera returned to Africa in 1985, giving direction to a rural community development project in western Kenya, then teaching at the Daystar University in Nairobi until 1995. In January 1996, Carl and Vera returned to Ethiopia to assist the Meserete Kristos Church in establishing its Meserete Kristos College, now Seminary. They retired to Harrisonburg, VA in 2011.
Carl and Vera raised four daughters and have nine grandchildren and six great grandchildren.