Allah. Not all of them, but enough to make the difference.”
“It’s holy work to them, in other words? They think they’re doing what Jim said we’re doing?”
“We’re not killing people or forcing anyone to believe in anything,” Ken said flatly.
“I didn’t mean that!” Her face flushed.
“I know.” He squeezed her arm in a fatherly way, which appeared to be as demonstrative as Ken ever got. “And listen, Quinette. I’m grateful to you and Jim. Every dollar was raised by you two, but don’t make more out of this than what it is. It’s necessary work, but holy? I wouldn’t call it that.”
“That isn’t real inspiring,” she stated, hoping she didn’t offend him. An expression of gratitude from him was a rare and precious coin, not to be squandered.
“I don’t trust inspiration,” he said, “or enthusiasm. They don’t last. I’ve been doing human rights work for twenty years, and the big lesson I’ve learned is that burnout is an occupational hazard. People get into it fired up, thinking they’re going to change things overnight. Work their hearts out for a while, find out they haven’t made much of a dent, get discouraged and worn out, and quit.”
“I’m not the quitting kind,” she said. “If I were, I would’ve quit on myself a long time ago. I almost did, but in the end I didn’t.”
Quinette’s psyche had not lost all its baby fat; she was still young enough to find herself fascinating and to think that the story of her journey from darkness into the light of grace was unusual, if not unique. She was inviting Ken to ask her to tell it, but he said nothing.
“The Lord wouldn’t let me quit, I guess.” Trying a different approach. “A lot of people were praying for me, and they wouldn’t let me either. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
It was hard to interpret the movement Ken made with his head. A nod encouraging her to go on? But there was an impatience in the motion, suggesting that, whatever her story, it was one he’d heard before and didn’t care to hear again.
The red road ran on, hard underfoot and cracked everywhere, as if it had been paved with broken bricks. Termite mounds and anthills made of the same sun-baked clay rose out of the grass to heights of five feet or more, some resembling obelisks, some eroded sand castles, with wind-worn towers and turrets. Quinette marveled at the industry of the insects and wondered how many ant and termite generations it had taken to build those structures. She thought of the stonemasons who’d built the cathedrals in medieval Europe—fathers, sons, and grandsons working on the same project and not a one living to see it completed.
They passed near a village: conical-roofed huts perched on stilts to discourage rats and snakes from coming inside, cattle byres that looked like pyramids made of sticks, forests of stakes driven into the ground for tethering cows and calves, and the smell of smoke and manure heavy in the overheated air. A man in shorts came by, walking in the opposite direction on legs so thin they didn’t look capable of supporting his weight, much less the weight of the bundled grass he carried on his shoulders in a sheaf maybe two feet thick and six long. A young woman wearing bead ankle bracelets and big hoop earrings sat in front of a hut, nursing a baby that looked too old to still be breastfeeding. In fact, the kid was standing up, as if he were at a drinking fountain. He stopped suckling, and as he turned to look at the strangers parading by, flies lighted on the dried milk smeared around his lips. Quinette had an almost overpowering urge to wipe his mouth and to scold the mother for not doing so herself. And yet the primitiveness of the village appealed to Quinette at some basic level, and she was drawn to the austerity of the landscape, with its thorn-bristling trees and earthy tones of beige, brown, rusty red. Life stripped down to its essentials. Two women came up the road, one behind the other, the first wearing a dark, saronglike gown and a five-gallon water can on her head, like a plastic top hat. The second was in a sundress that must have been donated by a mission or the UN, and carried on her head a woven basket of ground maize, with a rolled-up mat atop it. The women barely glanced at the soldiers and cameramen