Summary

Part Two, “Gusimbura,” Chapter Sixteen: Burundi, June 2006. Innocent continues to drive Deo and the author to different places important in Deo’s memories, including his medical school, which was vacant because of student vacations and somewhat rundown, but still in operation. When they visit the nearby hospital, author Kidder learns of the Burundi practice of keeping patients in the hospital, but without care, until they could pay their bills. This practice, he comments in narration, was one of the things Deo was determined to change about health care in his country.

Meanwhile, the author adds, Deo seems much happier moving through the memories of this place, and all his plans for “public health and medicine.” He goes on to suggest that “these, I think, were the subjects around which time could reassemble for him, around which past and present and future could begin to...