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problem for her to pitch her tent on the beach, and offered Hannah meals in exchange for helping out in the café.
    Hannah’s good nature returned after a week or so, but her eager-to-please, puppy-dog energy had been replaced by something calmer and more distant. That was when she began her walking. At any time of the day or night you might see her, striding through the streets or along a red dirt path above the beach, chin and chest thrust forward like a woman on a mission. She walked that way for hours, unafraid and unapproachable, perfectly poised on the crust of Africa, perfectly alone.
    “Where’s she going?” one volunteer or another would wonder aloud as we sat on the balcony of the Wato Bar, another favorite hangout, watching daylight turn to dusk. As the cloth wicks on the kerosene cans took flame one by one in the streets below, we’d crane our necks just in time to see Hannah slip quickly between the food stands and disappear.
    As time went on, she became fluent in Fanti, which she practiced with Gorbachev and the other African volunteers while serving us our food at The Last Stop. There were over sixty languages spoken among Ghana’s eighteen million people. Fanti belonged to Akan, the dominant language group, which most Ghanaians understood. Hannah’s English, too, sounded increasingly Ghanaian, her accent, sentence structure, and turns of phrase growing more African with each passing day. Her relationship with the African men had changed, too. She no longer flirted the way she once had. She was friendly, even affectionate, but a distance remained.
    “Why don’t you go out with Gorbachev?” I asked her once. “He’s such a sweet, gentle man, and you know he worships you.”
    “Eh!”
she clucked. “Ghana men and me, we are finished. Ghana men are
weak
!” she shouted, echoing a common insult the African volunteers threw at each other on the camps. “Now I want only Ghana. Ghana here,” she pounded the table. “Ghana is sooo sweet. Amsterdam was never my place. Ghana here, this is my place.”

    When the rains came, Hannah began spending nights in the small room attached to The Last Stop, with Sistah Essi and her two girls. Hannah and Essi had become very close, and often when Gorbachev and I went down there for a midday meal I could hear them giggling behind the kitchen partition while they chopped vegetables and stirred the stews. Sometimes I had to call out three or four times before Hannah would come out and greet us with a friendly, “
Eh!
Sistah Korkor, Brothah Gorbachev, you are welcome!”
    Essi’s husband, Kweku, was in the army and came home every month or two for a few days. He was known around the hostel as an odd character and a heavy drinker; the Ghanaian volunteers were reluctant to visit The Last Stop when he was in town. Whenever he appeared, Hannah moved back to her tent and, as though by tacit agreement, her relations with Essi became stiff and formal. Kweku was suspicious of her motives for working at The Last Stop, and one night she heard him shouting through the walls, while the two little girls whimpered and wailed.
    “They are so rich,” he shouted in Fanti, “to come here, from so far away, and stay for many months, doing nothing, buying whatever goods they please. Why then should she work like this, eating our food?”
    Hannah could not make out Essi’s reply, but when she heard what sounded like a hand striking flesh, she put her head under her sleeping bag and counted to a thousand. She offered to leave the next day, but Essi begged her to stay.
    “Sistah Korkor, Essi hates that man,” Hannah said. “If I were her, I would surely find a way to kill him.” We were sitting on one of The Last Stop’s uneven wooden benches at dusk, wiggling our toes in the cooling sand. A gentle breeze rose off the ocean, and a pale sunset tinted the foam pink.
    “I know,” I said. “It’s awful. And I have the feeling it’s pretty widely tolerated, too.” The previous