Four young girls accompany their missionary father and their mother to a Congolese village, and none of them manages to truly leave Africa again, although each reacts to the place in a completely different way, with a completely different outcome. I would not call this story, in which the naive family survives famine, drought, malaria, crocodiles and ant infestations, particularly uplifting. In fact, it is a downright depressing examination of the problems of Africa compounded by Westerners’ attempts to bring our god and our ways into a completely alien culture.