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her quaint romantic notion of a self-sufficient village economy and firmly believed that small cottage industries would solve the world’s poverty problem. Frank, too, was deeply attached to the notion of understanding how worldwide poverty could be overcome.
    Their five-day trip to the Masai Mara Reserve was extremely fascinating and took Frank’s mind off the misery and sorrow he had seen in Nairobi. The two hundred square miles of vast grassland plains, woodlands, and forest were scattered with herds of zebra, giraffe, gazelle, monkeys, buffalo, and elephants.
    After that, there was to be another week of sleepy coastal towns rich in history and culture, sleeping in huts and tents, and then the journey home. The night before they left, Susan had a mild rash and an itchy sore on her neck.
    She asked Frank to apply a cooling lotion. There was no mixing of the sexes in the backpacker’s hostel, and Frank kissed her goodnight. The next morning, she awoke with a fever. It wasn’t high, and she insisted on making the trip to the coastal towns. Frank had to practically force her to go to the local doctor. They waited for five hours outside a general surgery. The waiting room was littered with children with rickets, malaria, and typhoid. Frank had enjoyed the game reserve, but he was tiring of the whole African romance. He soldiered on for the sake of Susan. The kindly old doctor ruled out cholera and typhoid and prescribed her some antibiotics for cautionary purposes.
    Popping the pills, Susan jumped on the bus to the coast with Frank. Her condition worsened on the journey. Still, Frank had to physically pull her off the bus to have a night’s rest at a local inn. Late that night, her rash worsened and she had a throbbing headache.
    “We are getting out of here first thing tomorrow,” he said.
    They had Kenyan Airways return tickets, but with Susan having bought them at a discount, there was little ability to bring their flights forward. In any event, there was no flight the next day. The town had no hospitals. Frank took Susan to a medical center. The queues ran into the street and went two blocks down the road. The doctors were very busy treating emergency cases and suggested taking her to a hospital in Nairobi.
    By the time they got to Nairobi, Susan was no longer walking properly. Her speech had become slurred. Everything after that was a blur—all Frank would later remember was crying, screaming at the doctors to do something, running to the American embassy, calling her parents, and then Abe and Leeba. He remembered Susan not moving, him calling Mardi long-distance, and the final words: coma, sleeping sickness, second stage, nerve/brain barrier.
    On the way back, Susan was in a coffin in the baggage compartment. Frank would never forget the look on her parent’s faces when he landed. It took him two weeks in a hospital to recover, and he stayed on antidepressant medication for months afterward.
    When he came back from hospital, his first act was to throw the copy of E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful into the fire. Small, he knew, would never cure poverty or improve the human condition. A part of him died with Susan, and although he continued to do well academically, her death matured and hardened him beyond his years. After Susan, he never loved anyone the same way again—in fact, he hardly ever dated any women until more than a decade later.
    In the fall of 1989, Frank and Mardi were both twenty-year-old sophomores when Frank called Mardi for one of their weekly calls.
    “Hey,” Frank said.
    “Hey, man.”
    “Is it possible that something that is science is not science?”
    “You riddling me, Frankie?”
    “Mardi, you are the smartest person on the planet.”
    “You should meet my professor, Lawrence Fyshwick.”
    “Okay, you may only be the smartest person I know.”
    “Lawrence knows the trick to everything.”
    “Economic science has a bundle of contradictions. Ask your Lawrence how it survives