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my gear and gone directly to the building that had been designated as my home in Tumasi. Why didn’t I? The answer is simple. Whether she was American, Dutch, French, German, or anything else, I’d instantly pegged Martine as a woman, as it were, of my tribe.
    She surely guessed this as well, for she seemed not at all surprised when I came toward her, though she looked up from her basket only after I’d closed most of the distance between us. It was then I’d noticed her most distinctive characteristic: eyes so luminously green they seemed lighted from behind.
    “Hello,” she said when I reached her.
    “Hi,” I said. “I’m Ray Campbell.”
    She offered her hand, and the instant I took it, I realized how very different it was from the other female hands I’d touched. Those other, far less tested hands had been creamed, oiled, moisturized, daily soaped and showered. Martine’s hands had never known such pampering. They were not only rough, they were damaged, wounded by brier and scarred by thistle. Heat had parched them, and dust had dried them just as it had the hands of the village women I was later to know in Tumasi.
    “Martine Aubert,” she said.
    She was tall, with broad shoulders, and looked to be about my age, which was twenty-five. Her skin had darkened in the sub-Saharan sun, but even so, it was only a shade darker than my own. A line of freckles, very small and light, ran from just beneath her right eye over the bridge of her nose to the left one. In another place she would have looked like that fabled girl next door. Here, however, the color of her skin and the texture of her hair rendered her as out of place as a traffic light.
    “Tourists don’t usually come to Tumasi,” she said.
    “I’m not a tourist,” I told her. I nodded toward the little concrete building that was to be my house in Tumasi. “I’m moving into that one.”
    “How long will you be here?” she asked.
    “I’m not sure,” I told her. “A year. Maybe more. How long do you expect to be here?”
    Something in her eyes suggested how indulgent she was of my question, as if it had been posed by a little boy on his first day in class.
    “I will never leave,” she said. “I am Lubandan.”
    Never leave? Lubandan?
    Until that moment, and despite the evidence of her hands, I’d thought her a fellow aid worker, citizen of some donor nation to which she would certainly return to regale dinner parties with tales of her Lubandan experience. But as I now noticed, her clothes were indistinguishable from the long skirts and loose blouses of the other women of Tumasi. She wore the same colored scarf on her head and the same crudely made sandals on her feet. The basket before her was identical to those carried by the other women and a quick glimpse inside it showed me that its contents were typical of those bought by anyone else at the market.
    “You are American?” she asked.
    I nodded.
    “Many of you are coming here, I suppose,” she said. “To Lubanda, I mean.”
    Her accent had a characteristic Lubandan lilt, a soft fluidity to it, a sense of words strung together like small wooden beads. For some reason I’d expected to hear a British accent, but there were no soft a’s, no “cahn’t” or “tomahto.” As I later learned, her first language had been the French of her Belgian father, but he’d also taught her English, which she spoke slowly, with a measured gait, in a manner that was quite precise, but formal, too. She rarely used contractions, for example, and there were times when her English took on the syntax of her native French. She always said, “May I pose a question?” rather than “May I ask a question?” There were also times when specific English words eluded her and she would search for them, sometimes finding them, sometimes not. I would always remember that one of them had been “atonement.”
    “I hope that you will enjoy your time in my country,” she said. “And also, I hope that when you