Sunlight had barely pierced the curtains on our sixth morning at Pathfinder when I felt a housecat pounce onto the bed at my feet. It trampled over the blanket, using my thighs as a scratching post as it stalked upward toward my head. Clinging greedily to sleep, I flopped an arm outside the fabric and tried to push the cat onto the floor. But instead of meeting a soft coat of fur, my hand connected with a downy body at the same time a frantic flack flack flack filled the air.

“Ahhhh! Get it off of me! Get it off!” I screamed, hurling the blankets and a cyclone of tawny white feathers across the room. The chicken beat its wings furiously and let out a few pissed-off squawks before scrambling out the door.

Next to me, Holly groaned and adjusted her eye mask before rolling over again, determined to squeeze in another few hours of sleep.

“Oh, c’mon, you can’t be that upset,” Irene said later at breakfast, laughing as she used a Swiss Army knife to pare away the skin of a mango. “Besides, you’re the ones sleeping in her nest, not the other way around. She laid an egg in there every day till you guys came.”

“Are you saying Joshua doesn’t care if a chicken uses the second bedroom as a coop?”

“Well, no. The family doesn’t mind it at all. In fact, they probably wouldn’t like it if she couldn’t get in there to do her business, so don’t lock her out.”

“But it’s taking our blankets and clothes and making a nest out of them,” groaned Holly, who finally realized I hadn’t been sleep-talking or hallucinating at 6 a.m.. “Why doesn’t it just stay outside with all of the other animals?”

“Well, she’s a pretty smart chicken,” said Irene. “She’s figured out how to open the door and close it again behind her.”

“Kind of like a Jurassic Park velociraptor!” added Jen, always able to find a movie reference to match the situation. I scowled in her general direction.

“What?” she asked, making a show of cracking a hard-boiled egg against the side of the table and peeling it slowly. “Don’t be in such a fowl mood.”

My scowl morphed into a mini-death-stare. She grinned back at me.

I spread a gooey layer of jam onto a thick slice of bread (after this morning’s episode, I vowed to become a full-fledged vegan) and wondered whether refusing to share my bed with a barnyard animal officially qualified me as a spoiled city brat.

The three of us had expected that volunteering in Kenya would require some serious lifestyle changes, and so far, I thought, we’d all adapted pretty well. This week, we’d learned how to shower by dumping soapy cupfuls of water over our heads, honed our squat-aim-fire method in the little wooden outhouse, and developed a subtle technique for plucking out any critters that had accidentally gotten cooked into our stew at lunch (at our candlelit dinners, we just crossed our fingers and hoped for the best). In fact, other than my barnyard squabble, none of the physical challenges of life at Common Ground had fazed me as much as I’d thought they might. Instead, what had really thrown me for a loop was the lack of a clear-cut purpose—or even a vague idea of what we should be doing during our time here.

Maybe we’d read one too many articles on Alternative Spring Breaks and Habitat for Humanity, but Jen, Holly, and I had figured that after reporting for duty in Kenya, an on-site coordinator would put us right to work constructing homes, digging wells, distributing supplies—anything to improve the quality of life of the local community. It had been Jen’s dream to volunteer in Kenya, but in the days leading up to our arrival, Holly and I had felt almost as eager as she did to put in several hours of hard work each day and to fall into bed every night feeling exhausted, sore—and fulfilled.

But things hadn’t worked out as we’d imagined. Upon getting here, we learned there were no orientation sessions, group leaders, or volunteer guidelines to follow. Once Joshua had introduced us to Mama Sandra and the fourteen boarders, he’d left the three of us to our own devices. We’d figured the work would be doled out soon enough, so we’d spent the unstructured time getting acclimated, using the days to walk around the farm or to explore Kiminini. Every evening, after playing kati, a form of dodgeball, with the boarders, we’d pull ourselves away to get cleaned up and head in to dinner. That’s when one of us would find the right moment to repeat the question we’d been asking Joshua, in various forms, since we’d arrived: “Is there anything we can do to help?”

At that he would shrug and tell us that our presence alone was making a positive impact. And maybe he’d have something for us tomorrow.

Jen and Holly were as perplexed as I was by this response. We’d come all this way to rural western Kenya to volunteer—and there was really nothing for us to do?

Part of the reason we’d decided to sign up with Village Volunteers, rather than a larger, glossier nonprofit, was that we’d been assured that nearly the entire monthly program fee would be transferred into the hands of the people who needed it most. Lower overhead and administrative costs translated to less waste, but, as we were learning, it also meant that there was no budget for an on-site coordinator to guide new volunteers. Joshua technically fulfilled that role, but he was pretty busy overseeing a school, operating a farm, running an NGO, and being a father to his five kids.

Trying to figure out if we were doing something wrong, Jen busted out her neatly organized Village Volunteers file and scanned the pages. She found a section that we’d either overlooked or hadn’t quite taken so literally and read it to us.

“The Volunteer Program isn’t designed to provide a highly structured schedule that guarantees eight hours of work each day. Volunteers who have the most fulfilling experiences are ones who are highly self-motivated and require limited direction. They understand that the pace of life is significantly slower than what they may be used to at home, and that ‘making a difference’ may be as simple as making a child smile.”

Irene, who’d been reading Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Poverty, put down her paperback long enough to reiterate the message: If we wanted to make a positive impact here, we couldn’t wait for Joshua, Shana, or anyone else to invent a project for us. We had to figure out what talents we’d brought to the table and find a way to put them to use. Her assessment was logical, matter-of-fact—and easier said than done.

I quickly realized that most of the idiosyncratic abilities I’d honed as a working professional—turning groaner puns into snappy headlines or instantly recalling the number of fat grams in any given food—had zero practical application in my new environment. In fact, none of us really had an ideal skill set to be a volunteer. Unlike the Bastyr students, we weren’t trained to administer vaccinations or medications to the families who would wait hours or even days for treatment at the on-site medical clinic. And even if we’d earned our official TEFL certificates (a requirement for teaching English as a foreign language)—which we hadn’t—the Pathfinder school already had a staff of young Kenyan women doing the job.

Even my attempts to help out in the kitchen, while appreciated by the cook, Peter, didn’t exactly go over that well with the other volunteers. The chapati flatbread I’d tried to make—clearly the most dummy-proof of all kitchen tasks—still cooked up to the consistency of unleavened Play-Doh. The girls tried to be polite as they sucked glutinous goo off the roof of their mouths, but their expressions said it all.

That morning over breakfast with the girls, I wondered if I might be more of a liability to the volunteer program than an asset. Maybe I should quit now, while I was already behind?

“Don’t do that,” said Irene. “Look—you’re a journalist. Maybe you could just write a couple stories about Village Volunteers while you’re here. Raising awareness for the program would be one of the most important things you could do.”

It was a perfectly reasonable suggestion, and actually something I’d already considered, but not such a great breakfast topic. I glanced at Jen and saw her eyes widen, as if she’d accidentally gulped down something she’d meant to pick out of her bowl. I shoved a huge wad of bread into my mouth and didn’t respond.

Because we’d yet to identify a real objective or routine here, I’d already started retreating into familiar habits—and that meant spending more and more time in front of the laptop. I’d even commuted with Joshua into Kitale a couple times to visit a cramped, overheated room housing a few old computers outfitted with dial-up connections. It was probably ridiculous to make an hour-long journey just to check e-mail, but there didn’t seem to be a viable alternative. If I let too much time pass before getting back to my editors, they’d move on and find another writer to do the job.

Fortunately, we were all rescued from the awkward pause by the return of a visitor from early that morning. It took me a second to identify the snowy-colored blur that darted under the fabric covering the front door, but Holly was quicker on the uptake.

“Oh no! Out! Out!” she shrieked, chasing the chicken as it streaked toward our room. A chorus of squawks and an angry flurry of feathers made the bird’s intentions clear. In the end, it was Holly who bolted out rear end first and retreated to the couch for safety.

A few minutes later, the bird strutted out of the room, taking her sweet time as she crossed the dung-coated floor and returned back to the yard. Jumping up, we all ran over and stuck our heads inside the door frame. There, just as Irene had predicted, was one large, creamy white egg—sitting right on top of Holly’s pillow.

 

As we spent more time with the girls at Pathfinder, what surprised me most was how much they acted like typical schoolkids back in the States—they cracked jokes, whispered secrets, played pranks, and gave one another a hard time. According to Joshua, most of the girls had lost at least one parent to malaria, AIDS, or poor medical care, and all had been removed from their homes to live here. Considering these challenging circumstances, it was remarkable that most of them were as outgoing and seemed as well adjusted as they did. They’d even formed little cliques and filled the archetypical roles that I still remembered from junior high school. In this group, pretty Calvin was the alpha female whose posse of friends followed her every move, hung on her every word. Naomi, the petite, fleet-footed jock, was the one you definitely wanted on your side whenever someone broke out the ball for kati. Also in the group: the chatty one (Constance), the big sister (Sandra), the clown (Tracey), and the troublemaker (Diana).

But it was Barbara, awkward, gangly-limbed Barbara, who unwillingly played the role of the outsider. She was taller than the others with a physical condition that made her limp, and so painfully shy that the other girls rarely invited her to join them in games of tag or beauty parlor or even slowed down so she wouldn’t be the last in the line for dinner.

To help everyone get to know one another better and encourage some of the shyer girls to participate, we invented a game called “My Favorite Things.” This involved sitting in a circle and taking turns sharing the things that we liked, such as meals, games, and school. As Holly explained this to the boarders, a few of them looked confused.

“But, Miss Holly, I don’t undah-stand,” said Alice, who was dressed today in the same daffodil yellow taffeta dress that she’d worn since we’d arrived. “What is this word—fay-voh-ritt?”

It hadn’t even occurred to us that in order to have a favorite of anything, you had to have choice: what you wanted to eat, what to do, where to go. The word hadn’t been taught in their English classes, so we asked if they knew what the word “best” meant.

“For example, is yellow your best color or is it blue?” explained Holly. “Red or green?”

The girls nodded to show they understood, so we took turns going around the circle.

“Okay, Nancy, what is your best activity?” Jen asked the boarder who wore a pink calico smock dress, one of the girls in Calvin’s clique. “What do you like to do after school?”

“My best act-tee-vity is to…wash the plates.”

Jen smiled. “Oh, that’s good, but we mean…what do you like to do for fun time? Once you’re done with school, when you’re playing with your friends?”

“Yes, I see,” said Nancy, looking confused. “I like to…clean the silverware?”

I thought she didn’t understand the question, but almost every boarder gave a similar answer: Polish the silverware. Sweep the floor. Carry water. Feed the chickens. The girls’ “best foods” included corn, rice, beans, and chapati bread. Not a single mention of candy or snacks, even though the treats were available less than a kilometer down the road in Kiminini.

Changing the game, we asked the girls what they wanted to be when they grew up. Several said they wanted to become farmers, nurses, or nuns, but some had grander plans.

“I would like to be a secretary in Nairobi. Or a police officer!” shouted Diana, jumping up and crossing her arms like a tough female cop.

“If I could go to school in the United States,” said Alice, sounding dreamy about the possibility, “I would attend university and become a doctor.”

“Yes, yes, that is my wish as well,” responded Constance, nodding vigorously. “But I would prefer to be a surgeon. This is possible in America!”

At the mention of this mystical, faraway never-never land, the tone of the conversation changed. Suddenly, several decided that they needed to come visit us after leaving Pathfinder, and they wanted us to tell them all about the United States.

What was it like to live in America? Did everyone dress as funny as we did? What did the movie stars and rappers look like in real life? Were we very good friends with Madonna and Beyoncé?

“So you guys like American music, huh?” I asked. “Just a sec…I’ll be right back.”

I tore off in the direction of the volunteer hut, returning a couple minutes later with my pink iPod and new minispeaker, an impulse purchase I’d made on my last day in New York.

Creating a short playlist of top dance tracks, I cranked up the volume. The speaker coughed up only a few decibels of music, but that was more than enough. The boarders, upon hearing the opening strains of “Crazy in Love,” bolted up from their cross-legged positions and started rocking out.

It was joyous, unbridled pandemonium. They jumped, spun around, and waved their arms wildly to the beats of J-Lo, Jay-Z, and Christina Aguilera. The four of us were pulled into the mix by eager little hands, and we grooved together on the lawn between their dorm and the cookhouse. Noticing that something was amiss, Mama Sandra came down from the house. I was hugely relieved when, instead of making us stop, she erupted into peals of high-pitched laughter. At least we knew that we weren’t corrupting the girls with inappropriate music.

Just to be a ham, I tossed in a little freestyle hip-hop choreography.

“Miss Amanda, stop! Please demonstrate this again!” shouted Naomi. “You can show me this dancing, and then I will copy it.”

Of all of the borders, Naomi was definitely the most eager to learn. Jen and I had agreed that under other circumstances, she almost certainly would have been an athlete of some kind—a track star, a soccer player, or maybe even a little gymnast.

I repeated a version of what I’d just done, and Naomi echoed the moves, performing them almost exactly as I had. Pretty soon everyone wanted in on the action. Even Barbara came over to join the group, and Irene walked her slowly through the steps I was doing.

By the time my playlist ran out, fireflies were lighting up the dusk. At the boarders’ behest, I clicked repeat and we started all over again.

“Okay, guys, I think that Mama Sandra wants everyone to come to dinner,” I heard Holly say. It was almost pitch-black outside.

The boarders retreated, but only after we promised to do it again tomorrow. And the next day. And the one after that. Our nightly dance classes had officially begun.

 

A couple days later, the four of us were holed up in Jen and Irene’s hut reading when there was a knock at the door.

“Karibu!” said Irene, using Swahili to instruct the person to enter.

There was a pause, and then Naomi cracked the door, peering inside. “Miss Amanda? You ah ready to come down now? Many students, they ah waiting.”

It was 5:45 p.m., fifteen minutes before dance class started, but Naomi looked worried that we wouldn’t show. I’d assumed that the novelty of listening to the same songs and repeating similar steps might wear off, but if anything, the boarders had become more dedicated day after day. We’d moved our lessons into a classroom at Pathfinder, one of the few buildings wired for electricity. That way we could continue dancing after night fell.

Naomi waited for the four of us to put on our shoes, then led the way toward the schoolroom. She’d been right; nearly all of the boarders had already gathered. Barbara and Sandra were scraping the heavy wooden tables and chairs into a clump at the very back, while the younger girls waited.

“Habari, ladies, thanks for showing up early,” I said, glancing around. “You’ve made it look like a real dance studio in here. Are you ready to get started?”

As they chorused their replies, I took my iPod out of my bag and set it on the blackboard. Even before I turned around, I knew exactly what I’d hear next.

“Shah-kee-rah! Shah-KEE-rah!” the girls shrieked, no less pumped to hear “Hips Don’t Lie” emanating from the tinny speaker than if they’d been watching the singer live at Madison Square Garden. I’d played the track at least eight hundred times, but they never tired of it.

“Not yet, girls,” I said, putting on my instructor hat. “What comes before that, at the beginning of dance class?”

“The warm-up!” shouted Naomi, thrilled to know the answer.

“That’s right. Okay, let’s get started. Everyone stand with your feet hip distance apart, swing your arms up over your head, and take a deep breath in,” I said, guiding everyone through a series of gentle stretches and low-impact movements. “Now let it out slowly…good…and let’s repeat that again.”

This warm-up—something I’d done a handful of times with the boarders—was an abridged version of one I’d done hundreds of times as a kid. When I was five, my mom had enrolled my sister and me in gymnastics, the perfect activity for two girls with enough pent-up energy to demolish her perfectly tended home.

We’d both excelled at the sport, so after we were old enough, Mom had moved us both to Houston to train under Bela Karolyi, coach to the gold-medal Olympians Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton. I thrived under the intense pressure, but when a back injury forced me out of competition, I didn’t want to give up the sport altogether.

I still can’t believe that at fourteen, younger than some of these boarders were now, I was hired by a local gym to teach classes. I was responsible for three sessions per day, every day, after school. My students not only listened to me, they actually looked up to me, something that blew my mind at the time. I continued coaching gymnastics through high school and part of college but decided to stop midway through my sophomore year, right around the time that it dawned on me that pretty soon, I’d be entering the “real world” and I should probably start preparing for it.

While many of my friends at Florida State were partying or chilling out on the beach, I went to the university career center to research internships. Spring break of sophomore year, I skipped a trip to Cancún with my sorority sisters and flew to New York, where I managed to talk my way into a summer internship at Miramax Films. After eight weeks of watching rough cuts of movies, clipping articles out of Variety, and spotting celebs at the office, I knew I had to do two things after graduation: move to New York and get a job in entertainment.

Almost as soon as I crossed the stage and collected my diploma, that’s exactly what I did. By the time I got hired in the city, I’d long since stricken “gymnastics instructor” from my résumé. My passion for working with kids had been neatly wrapped up and packed away along with my high school scrapbooks and old ballet shoes. In fact, I’d buried that side of myself so well that years later, when Irene had given us her whole “talents and abilities” speech, it hadn’t even occurred to me that I’d once been a coach and mentor to dozens of little girls. It wasn’t until my fellow volunteers and I began spending several hours every day with the boarders that I remembered the other job I’d once been pretty good at and started to think that I might have something to offer the Common Ground program after all.

During tonight’s class, I wanted to try something a little different. After hitting REPEAT on Shakira for the eight hundred and first time, I stopped the iPod and made an announcement.

“All right, everyone, line up in the corner of the room and watch me. Don’t move your feet yet, just look with your eyes,” I called out as the girls immediately moved to follow what I was doing. I explained that instead of me showing them the moves, I wanted each one of them to take turns teaching the class. Jaws dropped, and they looked totally freaked out.

“It’s just like follow the leader,” I said. “Everyone will start here in the corner, and one person will walk across the floor, doing whatever steps they want. It can be anything. Heavy clumps like an elephant. Lunges from side to side. Skipping on your tippy-toes. Then everyone else copies those exact same steps until we call out the next person to lead.”

Once Jen, Irene, and I demonstrated, the girls caught on quickly. I started the music, and the girls laughed hysterically as I went first, popping my head in and out in a version of the chicken strut. Naomi was up next, and she did a jazzy little walk, crossing one foot over the other and bouncing her shoulders. Then Diana went, followed by Nancy and Barbara, who got into the spirit of things, tossing in funky moves that impressed the other girls.

One by one, every student got her chance to lead. Any self-consciousness they had over being the center of attention dissolved after the first round. By their second pass, they totally had the hang of it.

The momentum and energy in the room started to build, and at some point it was impossible to tell who was the leader and who was following behind. We were moving in a big circle now, teachers and students, kicking up a chalky cloud of dust as we blew around the room like an incoming storm. The girls were shrieking and laughing, completely caught up in the moment.

It didn’t seem to matter that you could no longer hear the music coming from the tiny speaker or that the electricity flickered, plunging the room into semidarkness for a few seconds at a time. Utterly empowered, the girls seemed to be creating their own music and light. Whatever had happened to them before coming to Pathfinder and whatever would come next didn’t seem to matter now. In that moment, they could let down their guard, let go—and just be little girls.

We danced like this for I don’t know how long, moving in a frenzy until we were all sweaty and exhausted enough to collapse into a heap. Lifting my head to look around the room, I caught eyes with Naomi, who was completely out of breath.

She flashed me a grin, and I sent one back. I knew there was probably some teacher rule against having a favorite kid, but sue me. She definitely qualified as my “best” student.

“We ah. Doing this. Again tomorrow?” she asked, as if I might suddenly renege.

I pretended to consider the question for a while before answering.

“See ya here at six.”

 

Over the next several days, Jen, Holly, Irene, and I witnessed some remarkable changes within “our” girls. Many had been shy when we’d first met them, and they’d lacked a sense of cohesiveness within their ranks. But eventually, one by one, they all started to open up, to become more confident. Within the framework of the dance classes, they took risks and, for the most part, supported one another’s efforts—no matter who led and who followed.

Of course, they still teased the hell out of one another. But it seemed pretty good-natured, a way of bonding rather than tearing one another down.

The four of us—who’d all become initiated as dance teachers by now—wanted to keep the progress going after we left, to leave behind something more lasting than a few routines. We put our heads together to brainstorm, but in the end, it was Jen’s idea to write a play.

It might have been a lot faster to poach a script like Alice in Wonderland or Cinderella from the Web, but we quickly ruled out that option. What would the boarders really learn from a fairy tale of a country girl transformed by magic into a princess?

Rather than adopting someone else’s story, we decided to write our own original script, one featuring a powerful heroine. We wanted to show the girls that they possessed the strength to rise above adversity and make powerful changes in their world—no pretty dress or fairy godmother required. With the help of Shana Greene and a little online research, we discovered that few women in Kenya—or indeed anywhere—embodied the spirit of self-empowerment more than Wangari Maathai.

Known as the “Tree Mother of Africa,” Maathai was responsible for launching the Green Belt Movement, a massive grassroots effort to help women conserve the environment and improve their quality of life by planting trees. Her organization has assisted women in planting more than 40 million of them on their farms and school and church compounds, efforts that have reversed some of the deforestation threatening Kenya’s future.

What we loved about Maathai wasn’t just her groundbreaking environmental efforts but that she fought hard for what she believed in. Despite being arrested several times for her political beliefs (she was an advocate of multiparty elections and women’s rights) and being beaten by the police for her attempts to protect the environment, Maathai never abandoned her convictions. It was only after decades of fighting that Maathai was finally vindicated. In 2002 she was elected to Kenya’s parliament by an incredible 98 percent majority, and in 2004 she became the first African woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

We hoped this would be the kind of role model that would strike a chord with the boarders, a real-life superwoman they could feel proud of, if not eventually emulate. After Shana sent us several documents with background information on Maathai, the four of us spent nights after the dance classes taking turns writing our opus. Although we thought it might be tough to break down the biography into an engaging, kid-friendly script, Maathai’s life was filled with both dramatic and tender moments that made for a pretty cool story with more than enough parts for all the boarders.

After a week of writing, we had our full-length play, A Tree Grows in Kenya (or at least one copy of it), but we’d struck out with Kitale’s copy machines. None seemed capable of printing off more than a page a time, making copying the script a daunting task. Irene and Jen volunteered to hang out in the stuffy stationery shop and take turns copying and sorting eighteen scripts by hand.

“No sense in all four of us just hanging out here, watching the toner dry,” Jen said. “Why don’t you and Hol go head to the grocery store or the Internet café or whatever and we’ll meet you at the matatu depot around four thirty?”

“Really?” I asked. “That would be amazing. Are you sure? I really have like, six things that I need to send out, and as long as we’re in town, it would be—”

“Just don’t get sidetracked,” she warned me. “We can’t leave any later than about four forty-five if we’re gonna make it back on time for the auditions.”

“Of course, no problem. I’ll see you at the matatu stop near the Hypermart in about a half hour.” I said, already rushing to grab my bag and make a dash to the café.

“Amanda.”

I stopped.

“Seriously, we’re already running tight on time. I know you’ve got stuff to do, but we’ve been promising the girls for days that we’ll get started right at six.”

“No, totally. I understand. If for some reason something comes up, I’ll take the very next matatu right after you. I’ll be like, a half hour behind you…forty-five minutes at most.”

I turned back to confirm that she was okay with that and saw her features cloud over, just for a second. Then, as quickly as it had come, the emotion blew itself out.

She sighed and tossed me the computer flash drive.

“Hey…thanks,” I said, pausing on my way out.

Jen didn’t respond. She turned back to the pile of papers and started sorting.

 

The sky had already turned navy blue and was fading to black by the time I took the boda boda bicycle taxi the last mile or so to Common Ground. I’d left my watch back at the volunteer hut, so I couldn’t tell exactly how late I was. But I knew no matter what the Indiglo dial might have read, the news wouldn’t have been good.

As Jen had no doubt predicted, I’d taken far longer in town than I’d promised—at least a good hour longer, or maybe even more. I felt terrible about it. The girls had probably waited as long as they could for me before finally hopping on a matatu back to the farm.

Ugh. I knew I should have gotten finished faster, should have made it back on time. These auditions tonight were among the most important things we’d planned during our time at Pathfinder Academy, and I was missing them.

But going over it again in my head, I figured it wasn’t really my fault. How could I have known that after all of this time with so few assignments, I’d get an e-mail from a magazine editor saying she’d loved my idea for “Traditional Healing Remedies from Around the World”? Or that the only way she could assign it to me was if I sent her additional examples and potential experts by the next day? Upon reading that, I’d scrambled to throw a memo together with some ideas but had been working too fast to remember to save my document. When the power cut out, as it almost always did, I’d lost half my work. By the time I repeated the process and hit “Send” on my e-mail, I knew my friends were long gone. I guess I just didn’t process how much time had flown by until I walked outside and saw that dusk had already fallen.

It had taken me ten minutes (and triple the normal fare) to convince the boda boda driver to take me to Pathfinder in the semidarkness, but I’d finally made it. Heart pounding and breathing way too fast, I practically sprinted past the guard at the entrance of the farm and into the compound.

From outside, in the darkness, it was easy for me to see inside the well-lit classroom. The girls were clutching the scripts that Jen and Irene had printed, and a few were standing in the middle of the room taking turns running the lines.

I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible as I slipped inside, to silence my heavy breathing, but everybody still stopped what they were doing and stared. Then Irene gently called their attention back to the scripts, and they kept going. Despite my mortification, some small part of me felt thrilled at hearing the boarders read the words that we’d written for them.

“Miss Amanda! You are okay? You are safe now,” whispered Naomi, clearly worried, coming to sit next to me as I slid into a chair behind one of the wooden desks. “We were thinking you would not come. I believe we are close to finishing for the evening.”

Finishing? They couldn’t be done already. Glancing up at the clock above the blackboard, a cold flush rinsed down my body: 7:42. Oh, my God, I’d basically missed it all—plus made the girls worry by staying out after dark.

I kept quiet all through dinner, just listening as Jen, Holly, and Irene discussed how the auditions had gone and which boarder would be right for what role.

After we’d cleared our plates and walked outside, I pulled Jen aside.

“Hey, got a second?” I asked tenuously. I knew Jen well enough to sense that she was upset.

“Sure…what’s up?”

We stood outside in the semidarkness, holding the kerosene lanterns we took to the huts with us every night. I could hear the quiet rustling of the cattle that grazed in the pasture directly behind our volunteer huts. In the beginning, it had been a little disconcerting living in such close proximity to livestock, but now the animals’ presence—the soft footfalls, the deep lowing—was slightly comforting.

The words tumbled out in a rush. “Jen I don’t even know where to begin. I know you reminded me what time the auditions started. I can’t believe that I screwed up. I’m so sorry to you, to Irene, to Holly—”

“Hey, you don’t have to be sorry to us at all.” Her voice was stiff as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. The lantern light threw long shadows across her face, making her expression all but unreadable. “I mean, it would have been great for the boarders if you’d been there, but realistically, you don’t need four people to hold auditions for fourteen girls. We handled it okay by ourselves.”

“I know, but I really, really wanted to be there, to watch the girls read for the parts.” I brushed away the whirl of the insects drawn in by the glowing lamp in my hand.

“Really? No offense, Amanda,” she said evenly, “but I don’t think you did.”

That made my head jerk up.

I took a step closer to Jen, held the light higher. “Of course I did. It’s just that something unavoidable came up, an editor had some questions for me that I had to answer right then and there, something that couldn’t wait another three days.”

“I’m sure it was important. It’s always important. But realistically, you made a choice tonight. It was either that pressing work thing, whatever it was, or the auditions we’ve been preparing to do with the girls all week. And one was just more important than the other.”

I tried to think of a response, to find some way to show Jen that the boarders meant more to me than some stupid e-mail, but I couldn’t. I had chosen some nameless, faceless editor who might see fit to assign me a story over fourteen boarders whom I’d spent every single day with since coming to Common Ground. I’d promised the girls I’d show up, that I’d be there on time, and they’d trusted me. It wasn’t good enough that Jen, Irene, and Holly had covered for me. I’d been the only one of the four of us to completely flake out.

Now, not only had I prioritized the little girls who’d come to trust me below my work demands—I’d disappointed my best friend. I didn’t need to see her face in the darkness to be sure of that.

 

I could hear Holly freaking out and slapping at things under her mosquito net just before she turned on her headlamp and ripped the netted nylon away from her body.

“Hey…you awake?” she whispered loudly as I snapped my headlamp on in response. Awake? I was lit up like a lightning rod. I felt like some kind of tweaked-out junkie who thought that she had roaches crawling all over her entire body. Except the difference was, the bugs that Holly and I both imagined were darting beneath our sheets were very, very real.

The Bastyr students had vacated this hut that morning, so Hol and I had finally been able to move in and get our own beds in a private, chicken-free room. Unfortunately, it sounded as if we had some new visitors. The second the lights went off, I could hear the pitter-patter of little roach feet scampering nearby. Down the walls. At my feet. Near my head.

I dashed over to the wall and flicked on the overhead light. Holly shrieked, a true bloodcurdler, as she bashed the headboard with a rolled-up magazine. “Oh, my God, they’re everywhere! We can’t sleep like this! What are we going to do?”

I couldn’t comprehend how, since three people had slept in this room directly before us, no one had noticed that our wooden bed frames were infested with roaches. When a full can of Doom bug spray failed to kill every last creepy crawly, we tried to be brave, to endure the mendes (cockroaches) that the boarders had seemed shocked we were afraid of. “We do not fear them. They will not harm you,” Naomi always said to me. But tonight, as Holly and I levitated above our mattresses and attempted not to scream loud enough to bring Joshua and Mama Sandra running, I decided that a little fear was probably healthy.

“C’mon, we’re going over to Jen and Irene’s,” I said, shaking out my sweatshirt for good measure and tossing it on.

“I was praying you’d say that!” Holly said, hustling to get her shoes on.

We knocked lightly and pushed our way into the other hut. The girls were reading placidly in their noncontaminated beds.

“Let me just come over and take a look,” Jen said. “If it’s really so bad, you guys can just stay here for tonight. We’ll figure something out.”

“I’ll go with you,” I said.

Jen put on her headlamp before walking outside. “Are the headboards really infested?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty awful,” I said, relieved that Jen and I were talking about something other than computers or e-mails or missed auditions. Even if it was about the bugs in my bed.

“Doesn’t this remind you of that time in Belize?” said Jen. “With the dive-bombing roaches?”

“Oh yeah, totally!” I laughed. Belize had been the first vacation Jen and I had taken together after getting “real jobs” in New York. We’d spent a chunk of cash on a jungle lodge in the Cayo District and been booked inside a thatched-roof hut with a tree branch resting on top. Which would have been fine, except the tree branch happened to have a roach nest inside. No matter how fast we’d killed them, more bugs had wriggled through the thatch and dropped on the floor. Then, as if our panic incited theirs, the roaches had started flying directly at our heads. We’d run outside onto the porch and screamed for a good five minutes before a guard went to the main house and woke the owner’s wife.

“I mean, this is the jungle, ladies. We’ve got living things here,” she’d said, pissed that we’d interrupted her beauty sleep to come down and see what the fuss was about. She’d barely finished her sentence before the mother of all roaches landed in her hair, sending her into paroxysms of terror. The last thing I remember is standing outside watching the woman thrashing a few bugs before finally coming back out and switching our room.

Now Jen stared at our bed frames—alive and shimmering with roach bodies—and said the one thing that made me abandon the room for good.

“Wow…they’re probably in your mattresses too.”

Shit. I hadn’t thought of that.

“Okay, you’re sleeping in our room. The beds are a little bigger than a twin, so we could probably line up head to toe. It’s not ideal, but you absolutely can’t sleep in here.”

“Are you sure? I mean, would that be a huge imposition?”

“An imposition?” She stopped short and shined her headlamp directly in my face. “You’re ridiculous, you know that?”

We walked back inside her hut and laughed. Holly hadn’t been worried about imposing. She’d already curled up underneath Jen’s covers, put on her eye mask, and lowered the mosquito net.

“So, um, Irene, I would never ask if the cockroach situation weren’t really bad over there, but is it okay if I share—”

“Don’t sweat it.” Irene pulled up her mosquito net. “I promise, this wouldn’t even broach the territory of weird or too personal back at Yale.”

Once we were as cozy as we could get with our feet in each other’s faces, Jen snapped out the light, and we finally got some sleep.