Author Note:

The moment you've all been waiting for… the explanation. Hope it suffices for you. Thanks again for the excellent reviews and questions and all of that. It's truly making my heart sing and definitely making me write faster. Keep them coming!

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"So, I called ahead to Gracia and arranged for them to have some tea ready for us when we arrived," Sharpay called from the front seat.

I replied that that would be great and continued to be mesmerized by the sights outside my window.

People zipping by on mopeds and stuffed into matatus, wearing colorful fabrics and yelling in beautiful Swahili… I was overwhelmed by everything. I had left my camera in my bag because I knew that my shutter couldn't actually capture anything that I was seeing. Sharpay had mentioned that we were going to spend the rest of the week just getting acclimated to Nairobi and so perhaps I would actually be able to take my camera out of the bag.

"Troy?"

"I'm sorry, did you ask me something?"

Sharpay smiled over the shoulder of her seat and I could tell that she knew what was running through my head. "Don't worry, Troy. I had that same look on my face for about two months."

"Awesome," I chuckled. "I'll recover when I've been back in California for a month."

She laughed. When did her laugh sound like that? Like joy spilling over? She always sounded like she was too busy for life in high school. "Trust me, you'll get used to it fast enough. The pace of life here is kind of addicting."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, it just all moves slower here. And not a bad kind of slower," she was quick to add. "It's a beautiful kind of slower. The kind where there is time to concentrate on the things that matter – like people and family and neighbors. Is that making any sense?"

"Not really," I admitted. "I can't imagine doing life slower and that being a good thing."

"Slower doesn't equal lazy, you know."

That thought had never occurred to me before. What does she mean that slower doesn't equal lazy? Wasn't the productive life what made us all rich? I mean, if I wasn't productive and such, then I wouldn't have money.

I suppose she saw the look of pause on my face because she gently added, "Just try to keep in mind that there are some things that western life is not the best at."

"You say that it's slower, but there's more traffic here than in LA," was the only response I could come up with to that.

"Very true," she laughed. "I hate driving in downtown Nairobi! It's a mess!"

"There is much traffic because we have few roads and many cars, Mr. Troy," Yusef added from the front seat.

"Please, Yusef, it's just Troy."

He nodded and continued, "Very few people in our country own their own cars and so we use the public transport."

"The matatus?"

"Yes, matatus. Between matatus and lorries and the few cars that we do have, our main roads get very crowded very quickly."

"Lorries?"

"Trucks," Sharpay supplied.

"When we go outside of the city, there is much less traffic," Yusef said. "In fact, this weekend when you go down to the Mara, you will probably pass only one or two other cars."

"Where is the mara?"

"It's in the southwest of Kenya, down by Tanzania," Sharpay answered. "The Masai Mara Game Park is the best safari in Africa. We've got a two-day safari package booked for you. Our driver will pick us up on Friday morning."

"How far is the drive?"

"About six hours. It will feel like more, though," Sharpay offered.

"Really? Why?"

"Almost the entire six hours is on dirt roads. Potholes like you wouldn't believe." She wiggled her eyebrows playfully. "But then again, it's not a real safari until your van gets stuck in the mud."

She and Yusef both laughed. I guess I'll have to take their word for it.

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"We have a pretty simple itinerary for you for the remainder of the week," Sharpay started out, pulling out a binder from her shoulder bag.

It was about 2 in the afternoon, Kenya time and we were settled into one of the shaded tables in Gracia's courtyard. After checking in and getting settled, they took me to an amazing lunch at a local chain called Nairobi Java House. If I ever find better coffee in my life, I will be shocked. Sharpay had said that her goal was to keep me awake until at least 8 that night so that I could recover pretty quickly from jetlag. I'm not going to lie… it was becoming a struggle.

I took a sip of the delicious tea that had been given to me. "Chai" they called it. Mostly milk, it was heaven in a cup. "Yeah, what do you mean by 'simple'?"

She handed me a few pieces of paper with times and dates and names on them. "Yusef and I figured that you should get a little acclimated to Kenya before we take you into our daily lives. Today is Wednesday, so tomorrow my friends Vincent, Helen and I are going to take you on a tour of Nairobi. Vincent and Helen are the people that I lived with when I first moved here, so I know that they're brilliant tour guides. And then you and I will leave early Friday morning for the Mara."

"Are just you and I going to the Mara?"

"Of the people that we know, yes. But I signed us up with a tour group, so we'll be riding and touring with strangers. We'll be driving on the way down there, but I managed to get us a flight on the way back. Trust me, once you take the road to the Mara, you'll be thankful for that plane."

"Is it bad?"

She chuckled, "Let's just say that pavement and Kenyan soil do not get along well."

I nodded, imagining what the roads must be like. "So when will I start work with you?"

"You'll start slowly next week. There are some places that we work that will be very easy for you to jump right in – the schools, for instance. But others involve one-on-one relationships," she paused to sip her tea. "Kenyan people are ridiculously friendly and they will want to know you deeply, but I have some friends and clients that will probably not be honest with me if I take you along on a home visit. It's not that you'll never go, you'll just need to meet them in another context first. We're working on those details."

"I watched Constant Gardener last week. Will we go there?"

"You mean to Kibera? The slum?" She laughed. "You will probably begin to feel that you cannot get out of it! Many of the schools that I work with and two of the clinics are in Kibera. You'll also spend time in Ongatta Rongai and Kingetteri – those are two other slums in Nairobi."

There were a few moments of silence and I finally asked the question that had been burning in my brain. "So, Sharpay…"

"How the hell did I end up in Kenya?" She smiled and reached for one of the pieces of cake on the tray in front of me. "I was wondering when you were going to ask."

I laughed. "I'm not going to lie. You are about the last person I expected to end up as a humanitarian worker in Africa."

"I'm not going to lie, Troy. It wasn't exactly on the original job aspirations list," she replied. "Living in a slum in Africa was probably up there with being Ozzy Osbourne's personal garbage collector."

"So, how did it happen?"

"Short version or long version?"

I checked my watch. "Girl, I've got nothing but time."

She smiled. "Get used to that feeling, Bolton. It's a good one, isn't it? That there isn't email to check or an appointment to rush off to."

I did notice a certain freedom in the fact that this mysterious woman in front of me controlled my schedule and she told me that we had no where else to be until dinner that evening. I literally had no where else to be than sitting at this table and taking the time to listen to someone's story. Very cool feeling.

"Well, get settled. I'm going to ask Paul for another cup of tea, do you want one?"

"Sure, why not."

She got up and walked over to the hut where Paul was standing. I could hear them having a pleasant conversation, which kind of amazed me. The Evans' always had maids back in Albequerque and Sharpay was clear that it was never worth her time to know them. Here she is chatting it up with the guy who pours tea.

"Okay, so the journey of me …" She started as she sat back down. "Well, you know that I went to NYU. You went to Kentucky, right? To play basketball?"

"Yeah, you were doing musical theater last that I heard."

"That lasted for about a year."

Only a year? The girl had her own microphone system. "Only a year?"

"You know that whole big fish small pond thing? I got hit with that… hard."

"Ouch."

"Yeah, well. I tried out for everything that NYU offered and even some of the things in the local theater, but I was competing against students whose theater departments put Darbus' to shame. I mean, some of these kids had been doing two or three full-on musicals a year since they were in seventh grade. Their resumes were so much better than mine. I couldn't even get past the door for most auditions."

"Seriously?!"

"Yeah. And as much fun as my theater classes were, they weren't quite as fun as actually doing theater. I began to realize that I wasn't willing to just be in the chorus for the rest of my life."

"I can't imagine anyone casting you in the chorus, Sharpay."

She smiled, "Yeah, but your reference for theater is Darbus."

"Did you ever try for television stuff? Or movies? I dated an actress for a little while and trust me… you could totally own her."

There was that laugh again. "Thanks, Troy, that's precious. But seriously, I'm not a good actress. I can sing and I can dance, but acting is not my treasure. I probably would have done okay in those over dramatizied telenovellas on Telemundo or something, but for me, it was the stage or nothing."

"So what did you do?"

"Well, I guess I started to realize all of these things right around spring break of freshman year. I kind of went into a tailspin, to be honest. I stopped going to classes and threw myself into the clubbing scene. I kept going to auditions in the city, but it was all just… painful. I even stopped talking to Ryan for a little while."

Now that was shocking. "Seriously? He was at NYU, too, right?"

She nodded and took a sip of her tea. "Yeah, he's still there, actually. He's adjunct faculty in the theater department and a costume designer for a small theater in Greenwich Village. His wife, Emily, teaches in the English department and they have a ten-year-old girl named Sarah."

"So you're an aunt?" And Ryan's not gay? Wow.

"Yeah," she beamed. "Anyway, my roommate was a public health major and up until that point I had thought that she was a total bore. Her name's Margie. We're still friends, actually. It's all thanks to her that I found my calling."

"Really?"

"The last week of March… March 27th, actually… she told me that I either had to start going to classes and actually contribute to the cleanliness of the room, or she was going to turn me into campus authorities and get me kicked off campus."

"Would that happen?"

Sharpay laughed, "No, of course not, but it led to the fight that we had both wanted to have since September. I stormed out and ended up getting completely wasted at a bar a few blocks away. Campus police picked me up and called Margie to come get me. In my drunken state, I ended up spilling everything to her. That I wasn't sure I was in the right program, that I was homesick, that I missed everyone from East High but was too proud to even talk to them. I had even taken myself off of Facebook because I was so convinced that none of you would be my friend if I wasn't some big actress."

"Seriously, Sharpay? I went to college on a basketball scholarship and barely saw the floor until junior year. Gabi rarely left her dorm room because she double majored in accounting and English lit. Chad changed his major six times in two years. No one would have judged you. We probably would have bought you a drink of congratulations for admitting that you don't have it all figured out," I smiled.

"Good to know," she assented. "I want to hear more about everyone once I'm done."

So some of the old Sharpay – the slightly bossy taskmaster – was still in there. "Absolutely. I'll fill ya in on everyone I know about."

"Excellent. Well, the day after my confession, she asked me if I wanted to go to Papua New Guinea with her that summer. The NYU Public Health department was taking a trip to study the HIV/AIDS pandemic over there and there were extra spots for undecideds. As long as I officially changed my major to undecided, I could go. For some reason, it just sounded like as good of an idea as any, so I made all the necessary arrangements and went."

"Holy shit, that's intense."

"You're telling me," she agreed. "But it was the trip that literally changed my life. That next semester, I changed my degree to public health administration. Graduated Summa Cum Laude, managed four different internships and landed my dream job with Oxfam right out of college."

Summa Cum Laude from NYU? Damn. I barely managed the 3.0 that UK required for me to maintain my scholarship.

"What happened on that trip that was so dramatic," I asked.

She paused for a moment. "I saw people buried alive."

What.

"I'm sorry, what was that?" I almost choked on my tea.

"In Papua New Guinea, the dominant belief is that those who suffer from HIV/AIDS are caught up in witchcraft."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah, isn't that awful? But it's the same here."

"Even with all of the education?"

"Troy, I think you'll find that education is not as widespread outside of the West."

Okay, I really hate getting talked to like I'm stupid. "What do you mean?"

"In rural, agrarian societies, education is not a priority. So a lot of children don't go to school and a lot of adults are illiterate. It's hard to run add campaigns and such in that kind of environment."

We're definitely coming back to that point. "Is that what it's like in Papua New Guinea?"

She nodded. "It's mostly rural. So this disease shows up that kills people in all different ways, leaves sores and boils all over their bodies and they don't understand how it's passed – of course their first assumption is going to be witchcraft. Now," she continued, "it's not happening in the capital cities or anything, but definitely in the villages."

"So they bury them alive?"

"They believe that it's the only way to both kill the disease and the evil spirit causing it."

"Holy shit."

She was quiet for a few moments. "Her name was Marabe, the woman that I saw. I had just talked to her a few days before. In my nightmares, it's her screams that I hear."

Holy shit.

I saw tears glisten in her eyes. She quickly wiped them and continued, "Once I saw that, I knew that I couldn't live in a world where that was a reality and not do anything about it. I threw myself into the global war on HIV/AIDS. I even went back to Papau New Guinea the next summer for my first internship – that one was with Amnesty International. I've been working with some facet of the disease ever since – counseling, testing, education, lobbying, whatever was needed in the country I was in."

"So how many countries have you lived in?"

"Well, as soon as I got the job for Oxfam, I moved to London and lived there for about three years. Then it was India for about a year, Northern Ireland for a year, Rwanda for two years and now Kenya. I've been here for just under four years."

"Wow." That seemed like the only answer to give to that.

At that moment, her cell phone rang and she had to excuse herself briefly. I started into my tea cup and tried to process everything that I had just heard.

I knew one thing for sure, though.

I had to call Gabi.

She was never going to believe this.