This collection of true short stories (tied together with 80 old photographs and 12 original letters) is set in a very remote almost inaccessible part of Ethiopia back in the 1960s when Haile Selasie was still alive and in power. Partly for the adventure, but also just to escape being drafted into the Vietnam War, a young American couple volunteer to spend two years in a tiny village of grass huts helping several dozen very poor farmers establish a new town in the lowland jungle of the Rift Valley, on land recently given to them by the sometimes loved, sometimes loathed Emperor. The stories...