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the dust from my own grungy socks and shirts, I’d see her laboring over the heavy camouflage pants or scrubbing away at a spot of dirt on a white tank top. When I suggested to her that Rambo could just as easily do his own laundry, she shrugged.
    “How do you say, when you are with the Romans . . . ?” She giggled nervously.
    Hannah had little time for her old friends.
    “I have known this man,” Gorbachev grumbled to me privately, “and I have not liked him. I am very sure that he seeks only to marry a white sistah so that he may leave this country. He wants to be a doctor in Europe or America, where he can make a lot of money and own many cars. Our Sistah Abena, she is so innocent. She trusts every person.”
    A week later I returned to the empty hostel from the Makola Market in the middle of the day. The Makola Market was the largest in Accra, and its endless rows of outdoor stalls provided the ideal place to revel in the beauty of African fabrics. I was laying out my purchases—three exquisite batiks dyed in richly saturated blues, purples, and greens—draping them across my bed to admire, when I heard a strange, stifled sound, like someone choking. Looking around, I saw, through the gauzy veil of a mosquito net, a huddled lump on Hannah’s bed, covered by a sleeping bag. Alarmed, I rushed over.
    “Hannah? Is that you? What’s going on?”
    In one violent motion the sleeping bag flopped flat on the bed and there she sat, shaking and red-faced.
    “He will marry her!” she screamed. “He is all made of lies! He will marry
her!
”
    “Who? Who will marry who?”
    “Rambo,” she sobbed, throwing herself at me through the mosquito net. I ducked beneath the netted shroud and wrapped my arms around her. She heaved and wailed against my shoulder.
    “I’ll kill him!” she cried. “I will give him petrol to drink. I will turn him into a rat. Then I will make him marry only me, after he is
dead.
”
    “Hannah, Hannah, sweetheart . . .” I murmured. She sobbed in my arms for close to an hour, occasionally breaking away to hurl accusations at Rambo and his unnamed bride.
    Eventually, the story came out. That morning, while Hannah was still in bed, a former volunteer named Isabella had arrived from Spain. Rambo had introduced her to the omnipresent crowd on the steps as his fiancée. He’d been anxiously awaiting her return, he said; they would be married at the end of the month. Hannah heard the commotion and wandered out in her oversized T-shirt to find Rambo lip-locked in the sort of public display of affection he was never willing to engage in with her. When he came up for air, Rambo met her eyes for a long, cool moment, then looked away. She ran and threw her arms around him, shouting that he was hers. He pushed her away, and told the astonished Isabella—whom Hannah alternately described as ugly as a rhinoceros and beautiful as Sophia Loren—that this crazy girl had been hanging around the hostel bothering the volunteers and would soon be shipped back to Sweden or Germany, wherever she came from.
    “But that’s ridiculous!” I sputtered. “She’ll hear the truth before the day is out. She’ll know he can’t be trusted.”
    But Rambo and Isabella had taken Isabella’s things and left the hostel. Hannah had run after them, trying to grab the luggage out of Rambo’s hands. Several of the assembled men held her back, chuckling and clucking, trying to soothe her. Now she no longer wanted to live in the hostel, no longer wanted to see the faces of those men.
    Hannah had long ago befriended Sistah Essi, the feisty, sparkly-eyed young proprietress of a tiny beachside restaurant called The Last Stop. Located about a quarter mile from the hostel, The Last Stop was a favorite volunteer hangout, a breezy open-air shack with sand underfoot, located a short sprint from the ocean. Essi lived with her two daughters, ages one and three, in a room adjoining the restaurant. She assured Hannah it would be no