Paul Heusinkveld ’72

The book Elephant Baseball by Paul Heusinkveld ’72 of Holland, Michigan, offers an insider’s view of a unique world: the boarding-school experience of the missionary kid. Now retired after a career with the U.S. Department of State, Paul was a student at Kodaikanal School in the mountains of south India from fifth grade through high school graduation in 1968. The school was established in 1901 by members of multiple missionary boards’ missions from the United States, Canada and Europe to provide education for their missionaries’ children, and his parents were Reformed Church in America (RCA) medical missionaries serving in Bahrain when he began attending. In chronicling portions of his eight years at the school, he paints a picture of both the moment in time and place, and his own journey of discovery as the experience shaped him. Elephant Baseball: A Missionary Kid’s Tale has been published by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Cambridge, U.K., in the Historical Series of the Reformed Church in America.