2017 two Ben Franklin Silver awards for Multicultural and Nonfiction/Best New Voice!
2016 New England Book Festival Honorable Mention
Impressions and images of a young American couple going to live and work for the government with economist Wolfgang Stolper in West Africa sixty years ago.
A young American joins her husband on a pre–Peace Corps mission to newly independent Nigeria: she to work in the Ministry of Education, while he joins a team of economists sent by the Ford Foundation. Gretel’s letters home give an inside view of the fledgling government. Full-color slides bring alive the vibrant cultures of the new nation.
Life among British civil servants, visiting foreign diplomats and speculators, and daily interactions with the Nigerian people are the heart of this story. Included in Clark’s anthropological musings, and economic development theories, is the birth of her first child in a West African government hospital.