ABOUT A DRIAN ,” Rose warned Ellie. In her sixties, stout and bristling with energy, boasting a crisp British accent to match her crisp blue dress, Rose Hampton was the administrator of the clinic where Ellie would be working. During the drive from the airport, Rose had provided Ellie with a brief biography of herself. She was a widow whose late husband had been in the foreign service. His last posting had been in Ghana, and after his death she’d stayed on, putting her management skills to work at the clinic so Dr. Adrian Wesker could be brilliant and perform his healing magic free of bureaucratic demands.
She continued to talk about Dr. Wesker’s extraordinary abilities as Ellie unpacked her things in the cramped cubicle of a bedroom she’d been assigned to in the residence compound next door to the clinic. Fortunately, she’d packed light. Had she brought more clothing, she’d have had no place to store it. The room featured a three-drawer chest, a closet the size of a high-school locker, a narrow bed with a foam mattress and a nightstand. Thin cotton drapes hung across the tiny window, which overlooked the cinderblock side wall of the clinic.
If Ellie had wanted a four-star resort, she wouldn’t have come here. The stark, cell-like room would serve as a perfectly adequate home for the next six months.
“Every woman who passes through the clinic gets a crush on him,” Rose warned, looming in the doorway and watching Ellie sort her clothes into the snug drawers. “Some men, too, I’d imagine. I must warn you that his first, last and only love is the clinic.”
“I’m here because I want to fall in love with the clinic, too,” Ellie assured her with a smile. The notion of getting a crush on some single-minded, charismatic doctor with supernatural talents amused her. She was too old and weary for that kind of thing.
“He’s been here seven years now,” Rose continued. She entered the room, crowding it with her bulk, and settled herself on the wooden stool at the foot of Ellie’s bed, which was madewith fresh white sheets and a cotton spread. “I daresay he’ll wind up dying here. He hardly ever goes back to London anymore, except on fund-raising missions. His passion is here, with his patients. The women and children. You’ve familiarized yourself with the literature we sent, I presume?”
“Yes.” Ellie had read about the economic upheaval in the villages surrounding Kumasi, Ghana’s second-largest city. Developers were sometimes buying and sometimes simply stealing the small farms that surrounded the city, often with the complicity of village chiefs. Men tended to own and work on farms farther out from the city, cultivating land too distant from Kumasi’s urban center to interest the developers. But the smaller, closer farms were generally owned and worked by women. Once these women lost their plots, they could no longer feed their families and earn money with their home-grown crops.
Funded by several international charities, Dr. Wesker’s clinic served the medical needs of those economically displaced women and their children, as well as the farm women and children living in the territory surrounding the city. The clinic was always looking for pediatric nurses willing to serve a few months in exchange for free room and board, an exotic experience and a chance to feel they’d made some small contribution to the world.
When Ellie had learned about the program, she’d lunged at the opportunity. Both her daughters had flown from the nest and the house was painfully silent. A boy should have been thumping up and down the stairs, leaving trails of mud with his soccer cleats, devouring groceries faster than she could buy them, blasting god-awful hip-hop music through the speaker of his laptop and pretending he wasn’t excited about the femaleclassmates who called to talk to him and giggled as they passed along the news that some other girl—never the callers themselves, of course—had a
She continued to talk about Dr. Wesker’s extraordinary abilities as Ellie unpacked her things in the cramped cubicle of a bedroom she’d been assigned to in the residence compound next door to the clinic. Fortunately, she’d packed light. Had she brought more clothing, she’d have had no place to store it. The room featured a three-drawer chest, a closet the size of a high-school locker, a narrow bed with a foam mattress and a nightstand. Thin cotton drapes hung across the tiny window, which overlooked the cinderblock side wall of the clinic.
If Ellie had wanted a four-star resort, she wouldn’t have come here. The stark, cell-like room would serve as a perfectly adequate home for the next six months.
“Every woman who passes through the clinic gets a crush on him,” Rose warned, looming in the doorway and watching Ellie sort her clothes into the snug drawers. “Some men, too, I’d imagine. I must warn you that his first, last and only love is the clinic.”
“I’m here because I want to fall in love with the clinic, too,” Ellie assured her with a smile. The notion of getting a crush on some single-minded, charismatic doctor with supernatural talents amused her. She was too old and weary for that kind of thing.
“He’s been here seven years now,” Rose continued. She entered the room, crowding it with her bulk, and settled herself on the wooden stool at the foot of Ellie’s bed, which was madewith fresh white sheets and a cotton spread. “I daresay he’ll wind up dying here. He hardly ever goes back to London anymore, except on fund-raising missions. His passion is here, with his patients. The women and children. You’ve familiarized yourself with the literature we sent, I presume?”
“Yes.” Ellie had read about the economic upheaval in the villages surrounding Kumasi, Ghana’s second-largest city. Developers were sometimes buying and sometimes simply stealing the small farms that surrounded the city, often with the complicity of village chiefs. Men tended to own and work on farms farther out from the city, cultivating land too distant from Kumasi’s urban center to interest the developers. But the smaller, closer farms were generally owned and worked by women. Once these women lost their plots, they could no longer feed their families and earn money with their home-grown crops.
Funded by several international charities, Dr. Wesker’s clinic served the medical needs of those economically displaced women and their children, as well as the farm women and children living in the territory surrounding the city. The clinic was always looking for pediatric nurses willing to serve a few months in exchange for free room and board, an exotic experience and a chance to feel they’d made some small contribution to the world.
When Ellie had learned about the program, she’d lunged at the opportunity. Both her daughters had flown from the nest and the house was painfully silent. A boy should have been thumping up and down the stairs, leaving trails of mud with his soccer cleats, devouring groceries faster than she could buy them, blasting god-awful hip-hop music through the speaker of his laptop and pretending he wasn’t excited about the femaleclassmates who called to talk to him and giggled as they passed along the news that some other girl—never the callers themselves, of course—had a
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