About Me

Harold M. Bergsma is the son of United Presbyterian medical missionaries who worked in Ethiopia and northern India for many years. His early schooling was in India, at Woodstock School in Mussoorie. He speaks Urdu. He lived in various places in India where his father worked as a doctor. His earliest memories are of Taxila in the North West Frontier Province. Later he lived in Sialkot and later as a teenager in Ludhiana. Bergsma also lived as a child in California and in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

            At the age of eighteen Bergsma returned with his parents to India and enrolled as a senior at Woodstock School, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Prior to beginning his senior year of studies he took part in a three month ornithological expedition to Nepal led by the late Dr. Robert L. Fleming, his mentor, under the auspices of the Chicago Field Museum and the National Geographic Society. After completing his high school at Woodstock, he returned to the United States for college. He earned a B.A. in Religious Studies and Elementary Education at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan; his M.A. was in Secondary Educational Administration at Michigan State University and his Ph.D. in International and Comparative Education and African Anthropology and Linguistics at M.S.U. He was a Fellow of the African Studies Institute.

            His first overseas professional experience was in Nigeria where he worked for twelve years as the founding high school principal for both the Bristow Secondary School and the Wukari Division Combined Secondary school for the Christian Reformed Board of Foreign Missions. He speaks and reads Tiv as well and has studied the Hausa language.

            He worked eight years at Lake Superior State University as Division Head to help establish the new Department of Secondary Education. He moved to New Mexico State University as Head of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and retired there as Emeritus Professor of Education. He was involved in a variety of international projects while working at NMSU for almost twenty years, including those in Yemen Arab Republic, Pakistan, Belize, Honduras, Swaziland and Namibia. He lived and worked with his family in many of these countries while doing educational development work for USAID and World Bank.

            He has published widely in professional journals*. Bergsma, has written extensively about the Tiv Tribe of Nigeria, publishing a school reader, Tales Tiv Tell with Oxford University Press which is in its sixth re-print and has published two monographs for Africa, Oxford University Press, London, about traditional Tiv Kuraiyol and Tiv Proverbs as a Means of Social Control. His has written two unpublished books about the Tiv, Traditional Tiv Religious Practices and a novel, Cries in the Night. In October 2005 he published a work of fiction, Lalla and Lavina, Stories about Indian Women, through Authorhouse, Bloomington, Indiana. His next writing project is a memoir entitled, Rhododendron Wine Factory, Memoirs of a Wanderer, which was published in the spring of 2006.