Kelsey Chase (senior English major, University Scholar, and track and field athlete) spent part of last summer in South Sudan, Kenya and Ethiopia living with African Christians, interviewing them and writing about their stories of faith.
Kelsey has loved Ethiopia since she first visited seven years ago (and not just because of the coffee) and feels it’s important that the stories of Ethiopians are told with faithfulness to their history and literary tradition.
So, for her senior honors project, she’s collecting the stories of Ethiopian Christians and juxtaposing these stories to Ethiopian folk tales. Kelsey’s relying on her experience reporting for SPU’s The Falcon ,and as many English classes as she can squeeze in, to guide her in conscientiously reproducing these stories, with special sensitivity to the imagery and symbolic content of the narratives.
Kelsey doesn’t know yet where this project is leading but is hopeful it will allow her to return to Ethiopia or pursue graduate studies in African Literature. And if all else fails, she thinks being a librarian in a library with old books and big wide windows (preferably at Oxford University, where she studied for a semester) sounds pretty great as well.