Impossible Odds

flee the area before it was known whether any of the children had been kidnapped again by the LRA fighters, or if any were still in hiding. The shock left me cowed into silence, not by fear, but by the vague sense of having been rebukedby circumstance for showing up unprepared. What did I think I was doing?
    While our rickety plane sputtered into the air, I considered the miseries visited upon those children and the fact that we were so powerless to give meaningful help. I was barely out of rifle range and already anger was bringing back my natural stubbornness.
    If you grew up as a nice girl or you know someone who did, then you realize that nice girls the world over are mostly sweet, good-natured, nonconfrontational, and quietly cooperative in most things. People like having nice girls around because their rough edges have been filed down and sanded smooth.
    But if you are one of the nice girls in question, there is only one weapon of social resistance available to you, and it is the trait of quiet resolve. Yes, some people call it stubbornness. I’ve never been the loud and rowdy type, and I don’t believe anyone thinks of me as confrontational. But I can plant my feet and root them to the ground.
    That’s how one does the nice girl thing without resorting to life as a wimp. Our failure at the orphanage really turned up the heat on what I continue to call quiet resolve, in spite of those who might describe me as being stubborn enough to teach the skill to mules. It wasn’t the dangers of Africa that appealed to me—I’ve never had a death wish and I’m not an adrenaline junkie. But in the plight of those innocent ones, I saw a place where I could make a badly needed contribution as a teacher, doing this wonderful thing that is essentially the same all over the world, but doing it in a part of the world foreign to me. There was more to learn than to teach, and I loved that.
    Susan went on to other pursuits, so I returned to the United States to complete my last semester of college, secure my teaching degree, and then come back down and try it again. A semester later, with my teaching certificate secured, I applied for a job at the Rosslyn Academy in Nairobi, Kenya. Nairobi is a metropoliswith modern infrastructure, and Rosslyn Academy is a Christian school, meaning my troublesome status as a single working woman wasn’t considered a cultural threat. I was glad to take the job in a place where I could begin to get a close-up look at the realities of daily life, but from a position of relative safety, protected from random gunfire and the feuding of clan hotheads.
    I would be living in a city, after all. If the new job turned out to be unfulfilling, why, a person could always move out to someplace less developed. For the time being, Nairobi sounded just right. I wasn’t hired to act as a missionary. All the academy asked me to do was handle the core classroom duties with several subjects and teach their fourth-graders in the hope of eventually helping them qualify for productive and legal means of attaining self-sufficiency. I was moved by their humble goal, a variation on the same thing most parents want for their children.
    So I happily packed for the return to Africa and pushed the sound of gunfire and the memory of my own screams in South Sudan to the back of my mind. That brief preamble to my Africa journey turned out to be an experience of self-discovery. The first revelation highlighted my vulnerability in remote places. The second was that I only felt more determined because of it.
    It was my great fortune in life to come from parents who understood the notion that people can find themselves called to all sorts of things. Mom and Dad understood my return to that continent, with Dad even lamenting that he couldn’t come along. For all those reasons, I felt ready for anything when the day arrived for me to step off the plane in Kenya for Africa redux.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Erik met Jessica for the first time in late September 2007. He was two days away from his thirty-first birthday and by that point he had spent nearly two years in Somalia, with frequent travels around Kenya and Zimbabwe for work and recreation. In spite of the difficulties and frustrations of local political work—three steps forward and two steps back—he could look back on his time in Africa and actually see a measure of progress on the ground.
    In spite of his satisfaction at work, things were definitely dry in the romance