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This is what happens when the daughter of a Mennonite sheep farmer and a big-city sorority girl embarks on a quest to find
her true self and perhaps her true love. On the way she abandons her ancestral German and goes to Paris where she likes that
the boys like her long legs.
But the soul of her journey takes place amidst the pulse of voodoo drums, the gift of a dinner rat, chants of machete-
wielding students, and choking heat inside a mosquito net, Monique Maria Schmidt gives us this searingly honest account of
two years of real life as a young Peace Corps Volunteer.
She lives alone, the only white teacher, struggling to find her place in a French-speaking West African village. Students
test her. Gendarmes leer. Big Mama gives advice. Daily life is redefined in the search for scarce food, in shutting out the
beatings of neighborhood children, in devising routines to stay sane.
Schmidt draws on the resourcefulness of her rural childhood in the ongoing struggle with cultural isolation and illness.
She seeks comfort in a romanticized relationship with the wrong man, and most stunningly, finds tender and raucous humor in
a bewildering world.
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