By Kristy Wagner
Staff Writer
In
September 1948, Jean Boyce-Smith and her husband, Walter, both of New
England, boarded a freighter carrying explosives and set sail for Kabul,
Afghanistan. The couple planned to teach English and looked forward to
exploring a foreign land, but their families warned them of the dangers
of visiting a Muslim country.
Boyce-Smith
wrote detailed letters home to her mother and, later in life, returned
to those letters to write her memoirs of the Afghanistan she remembered.
What
she described is very different than the war-torn Afghanistan depicted
by the media today. Boyce-Smith died in 2009 before she could finish
composing her memoirs. But her daughter, Ann Boyce of Arundel, pulled
the project together and, with the help of her stepfather, Perrin F.
Smith of California, self-published “My Afghanistan: The adventures of
an American School Teacher Before the Taliban.”
Boyce
teaches English at Southern Maine Community College. Her mother’s
memoir can be purchased at Kennebooks in Lower Village and at Nonesuch
Books and Cards in South Portland.
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