With a broken-down oven, in a hotel kitchen, on an uninhabited island
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Alan Barstow was a Peace Corps volunteer from 2002 to 2004 in Namibia, where he learned to speak Oshiwambo and ate everything from caterpillars to goats. His writing has appeared in American Literary Review and 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, and he is working on a book about the effect of AIDS on an African village. He lives in Redondo Beach, California.
Long past midnight Sam parted his mosquito net. He’d been in Namibia for a month, and each night he lay awake, listening to the corrugated-metal roof ping and the cinder-block walls pop as they cooled. He couldn’t adjust to his new surroundings: the language, the climate, the rural isolation.