Richard Sundström

Richard Sundström
The physician and the researcher.
Richard Sundström was born in 1869, he was a minister of religion. In those days it was not unusual to complement religious studies with other knowledge that’s why Richard went to the United Kingdom to study tropical diseases and qualified as a physician.

He had decided right from the start to become a missionary with the Swedish evangelical national missionary society. In Sweden he had met Johanna Broberg. They fell in love and became engaged. After he had finished his studies he was sent out to be a missionary in Gheleb, Eritrea.

Johanna was a trained nurse and travelled down to Eritrea to help him setup his missionary station. Immediately after her arrival in Gheleb they married on 5 November 1898. They had four children.

In 1915 Richard was sent to establish a new missionary station in Keren.
During his life in Gheleb and Keren, Richard has collected about a thousand pages in Tigre on the different tribes and clans in Eritrea. Some writings are in Swedish and fewer in English. He has categorized them, some in small books and mostly in sheets written in pencil with different handwritings. They are for example history and stories of the Blin, the two Mensa, Betjuk, Ad Temariam, Ad Tekles, Ad Sheikh, Hedarib, Belew, and the Turkish times.
 

Richard died of cancer on 16 June 1919 and buried in (Keren laAlai) keren. His wife Johanna finished setting up the station in Keren but had problems with her kidneys and returned to Sweden with the children in may 1920.
 

     Some of Richard Sundström´s books in Tigre language