About Oh Give Me A Home
In verse, Oh Give Me a Home relates the story of a girl’s inside-out view of America as she journeys from Ethiopia, searches for friends and belonging.
In elementary school, Jane knows that Maji, Ethiopia, cool and green, perched on a mountainside of waterfalls and monkeys, is the perfect place to live. Or it would be perfect if she had a pet or a best friend.
Jane is full of ideas that include schemes for an animal to play with. A real pet, not the dik dik that dies, the monkey that tries to bite her fingers, nor the elusive cat that lives in the shed and has just absconded with her litter of kittens. But her plans are derailed as Jane learns she is to move back to America with her family
America and Africa collide as Jane tries to answer the simple question, “Where am I from?” Entering grade school in suburban America for the first time, will she find a best friend a continent away from her real life in Africa? Or is America–where she meets her relatives for laughter and frolicking and big holiday meals–her real home?
Jane Kurtz was born in Portland, Oregon, but when she was two years old, her parents moved to Ethiopia. Jane grew up in Maji, a small town in the southwest corner of the country.
Since there were no televisions, radios, or movies, her memories are of climbing mountains, wading in rivers by the waterfalls, listening to stories, and making up her own stories, which she and her sisters acted out for days at a time. When she was in fourth grade, she went to boarding school in Addis Ababa. Her family left Ethiopia in the late 1970s, but a decade later, first her brother and his family and then her older sister and her family went back to teach in a girls’ school in Addis Ababa. By the time Jane came back to the United States for college, she felt there was no way to talk about her childhood home to people here. It took nearly twenty years to finally find a way – through her children’s books. Now she often speaks in schools and at conferences, sharing memories from her own childhood and bringing in things for the children to touch and taste and see and smell and hear from Ethiopia. “It’s been a healing and inspiring experience,” she says, “to re-connect with my childhood and also be able to help people know just a little of the beautiful country where I grew up.”
She is a co-founder of the nonprofit organization Ethiopia Reads that works to bring books, libraries and literacy practices to the children in Ethiopia. After fifteen years on the board of directors of Ethiopia Reads, Jane saw a crucial missing piece of the literacy work and turned her volunteer effort to heading the Creative Team of Ready Set Go Books, a project of Open Hearts Big Dreams. In late 2020, the team reached a goal of publishing 100 colorful books—fiction and nonfiction—each available in English and various Ethiopian languages. These books are available online and, as funding becomes available, printed and distributed in Ethiopia, providing reading practice and spreading knowledge of the daily life, geography, history, stories, proverbs and cultural traditions of Ethiopia.