Annette Allen
| Annette is half-English,
half-Norwegian and spent much of her childhood living out of
suitcases, as the family travelled from city to city, country
to country, following her father’s aeronautical career.
Most of her childhood was in Africa: Ethiopia and South Africa.
When she witnessed the endemic poverty in these countries, she
developed a strong sense of justice for these people, who had
so little, and yet were often happier than we were, with all
our material possessions. Her simple, Christian faith grew from
such encounters. |
 |
After returning to Britain in 1972, she moved
into corporate communications, working for major international companies.
She won awards for some of her work, but as she approached 40, life
began to seem increasingly meaningless, despite the BMW in the drive,
the birth of James in 1989, and a lovely house.
Everything changed, after her mother’s
death in 1993. She stopped work for a while to care for her and
began to question what life was really all about. In particular,
she was puzzled by the still, clear dreams she had, messages which
had no connection whatsoever to the previous day’s events.
She began to wonder if these could, perhaps, foretell her future.
Her first book “An Ethiopian Odyssey”
is about her quest to find nine classmates from her schooldays in
Addis Ababa in1964, prompted by another dream in April 2000 –
she’d returned there to help provide water. Setting off in
March 2004, guided by dreams and the old black and white photo of
the women, with just their Christian names on the reverse, little
did she anticipate that she would cross three continents to track
them down, helped by men and women around the world. The dream spread
everywhere, on the internet, radio programmes and TV news and ends
at St. Paul’s Chapel in New York, the little church of such
peace beside Ground Zero. The city is home to two of her former
classmates.
It’s Annette’s intention to
find all the remaining classmates and include their stories in book
2. On the front cover will be the class, as they are today, standing
on those same steps at Nazareth School for Girls, Addis Ababa.
|
