Butterflies in My Soup

With most of her friends married, Sylvia at 23 can find no good reason for turning down her boyfriend’s proposal of marriage. In her heart, though, she knows that she longs to be free to see more of the world before settling down to what she feels would be a humdrum life of a domestic city in the early 1960s. Having been dissuaded from accepting a teaching job in the USA, she continues her quest for an overseas posting until one day, she finds exactly what she's been looking for. A boarding school in Lushoto, a township in the Usambara Mountains, Tanganyika (Tanzania) needs a teacher.

With scant information about her destination, other than that African violets grow wild in the Usambara, Sylvia flies off to East Africa leaving her anxious family and a fiancé whose determination to wait for two years for her will be severely tested.

Nothing could prepare Sylvia for the amazing life that she was to lead, with experiences, friendships, and challenges that she could never have imagined, and with memories that she would cherish and try to recapture on a return visit many years later.

Sylvia Bowley gained the certificate of education at Salisbury Training College and is a graduate of the Open University. She has taught in senior and junior schools in Surrey, Tanzania, West Wales, and the West Midlands.

Since 1973, she and her husband have holidayed in Europe, mainly in France and Spain, in their camper van but on retirement in 1999 set about seeing the rest of the world on long-haul trips by plane.

For the past fifty years, Sylvia has lived in a small market town in Shropshire.

She has a son and two step-daughters.