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sounds.
    The two women stand quietly for a moment side by side in the chilly Ethiopian night.
    “She didn’t want the child anyway,” Caroline murmurs. “She already has eight children. I shouldn’t be sad.”
    “I’m thinking of asking for a transfer,” Lannie interjects. She’s been thinking of no such thing, until now, until Rob.
    “You don’t work for anybody.” Caroline’s voice is sharp. “You can go if you want to.” Lannie is silent.
    “I need somewhere to go,” she says finally. “Any ideas?”
    “Yes,” Caroline answers, still harsh. “Go home. Go home before you wind up like me, with no home to go to. Until home is a camplike this one, in some godforsaken country where it never rains, or it rains too much, where wars never end, and people never have enough to eat.”
    Her words frighten Lannie. Caroline is the heart of this camp, she’s the one all of them turn to for advice, for help, for the courage to continue. If Caroline gives up, Lannie knows, all the camps in the whole country will collapse, because the Carolines, with their quiet hope, their bottomless courage, their gentle certainty that they are doing the right thing, the very thing required by human decency, are all that keeps the weaker of them, like Lannie herself, from bolting during the moments when they can’t tell their days from their nightmares.
    “Today we fed — how many hungry people?” she asks, knowing the count perfectly well, as does Caroline, and a little surprised at finding herself the one to comfort instead of to be comforted. But she puts out her hand and rests it briefly on Caroline’s shoulder, then lets it slide away.
    “And tomorrow they will be hungry again,” Caroline says. Then she laughs, a sad, tired laugh. “I’m sorry. You’re right, of course. But when this is over, I’m going to find something to do that will have a longer-lasting effect.”
    “Like what?” Lannie asks.
    “Oh, I don’t know. Help set up health-care clinics, maybe, with local staff, in the farthest out-of-the-way places I can find.”
    They don’t say anything, each of them thinking her own thoughts of Ethiopia. Of the fight against local medicines, of prejudices and superstitions. Of Sidamo, where malnourished people live beside a lake teeming with fish and won’t eat them, eat instead the false banana, a species providing only carbohydrates. Of Mengistu’s government with its hidden agendas and priorities, caught up in imperatives out of a hideously long and convoluted past nobody but Ethiopians understand, and maybe not even them, but none of these agendas apparently having much to do with feeding hungry people. Of the vast, roadless countryside,
the trackless waste,
cut with perilously deep, straight-sided ravines, and too-high mountains, the unbridged rivers, the deserts. Lannie thinks of Rob, an engineer, ofall the roads that need building. She thinks of Mariam in her village, watching the child recede from her forever. The drums are still muttering in the huts on the edge of the scattered, rubbish-ridden town. They’ve become one with the Ethiopian night.
    From across the blackness of a farmer’s barren, unploughed field, they cannot so much see or even hear as feel the presence of the thousands in need of help. They hover in the darkness, a vague, dark shape with a million glittering eyes and listening ears, thinking of history, of how it has always been so, and maybe always will be, coughing, whispering, sighing, moaning, waiting in the shadows for the return of the intractable, burning orb to illuminate the darkness for one more day.
    Lannie shakes herself, puts a hand against the rough mud wall of their house to anchor herself.
    “Have you noticed,” she asks, looking up past the leaves of the eucalyptus trees to the dark night sky, “that Ethiopian stars are in all the wrong places?”

The Farm
    March 1993
    This spring from the banks of the South Saskatchewan River all the way down to the Montana