round and bright as jewels. I noticed a patch of haze in the otherwise clear sky and stepped farther away from the fire,
thinking perhaps it was the smoke, then deciding that it must be a cloud. I was wondering why the cloud hadn’t moved
when I heard the sound of footsteps behind me.
“I believe that’s the Milky Way,” Mr. Wilkerson said, looking up at the sky.
“No kidding.”
He held up his hand and traced out the constellations for me, the points of the Southern Cross. He was a slight, soft-
spoken man with round glasses and pasty blond hair. Initially I had guessed he spent his life indoors, an accountant or
professor. I noticed, though, as the day had passed, that he possessed all sorts of practical knowledge, the kinds of
things I had never got around to knowing but wished that I had. He could talk at length with Francis about Land Rover
engines, had his tent up before I drove in my first stake, and seemed to know the name of every bird and every tree that
we saw.
I wasn’t surprised, then, when he told me that he had spent his childhood in Kenya, on a tea plantation in the White
Highlands. He seemed reluctant to talk about the past; he said only that his family had sold the land after independence
and had moved back to England, to settle in a quiet suburb of London. He had gone to medical school, then practiced
with the National Health Service in Liverpool, where he had met his wife, a psychiatrist. After a few years, he had
convinced her to return with him to Africa. They had decided against living in Kenya, where there was a surplus of
doctors relative to the rest of the continent, and instead settled on Malawi, where they both had worked under
government contract for the past five years.
“I oversee eight doctors for a region with a population of half a million,” he told me now. “We never have enough
supplies-at least half of what the government purchases ends up on the black market. So we can only focus on the
basic, which in Africa is really what’s needed anyway. People die from all sorts of preventable disease. Dysentery.
Chicken pox. And now AIDS-the infection rate in some villages has reached fifty percent. It can be quite maddening.”
The stories were grim, but as he continued to tell me the tasks of his life-digging wells, training outreach workers to
inoculate children, distributing condoms-he seemed neither cynical nor sentimental. I asked him why he thought he had
come back to Africa and he answered without a pause, as if he’d heard the question many times.
“It’s my home, I suppose. The people, the land...” He took off his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. “It’s
funny, you know. Once you’ve lived here for a time, the life in England seems terribly cramped. The British have so
much more, but seem to enjoy things less. I felt a foreigner there.”
He put his glasses back on and shrugged. “Of course, I know that in the long run I need to be replaced. That’s part of
my job-making myself unnecessary. The Malawian doctors I work with are excellent, really. Competent. Dedicated. If
we could just build a training hospital, some decent facilities, we could triple their number in no time. And then...”
“And then?”
He turned toward the campfire, and I thought his voice began to waver. “Perhaps I can never call this place home,” he
said. “Sins of the father, you know. I’ve learned to accept that.” He paused for a moment, then looked at me.
“I do love this place, though,” he said before walking back to his tent.
barré
(Barré)
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