The Poisonwood Bible: Books Six-Seven

There may be a few little faults in the plumbing and minor discrepancies among the staff, but I’m very confident of my service.

I didn’t have anything invested in Africa yet but a little old apartment boudoir decorated to the best of my abilities in blush pink.

Most boys his age still sleep on the pile of their families, but 'Taniel was adamant: “My brothers have beds to themselves!”

They reported that the Africans lived like kings, even wearing the fabrics of royalty: velvet, damask, and brocade.

There was no written language, but an oral tradition so ardent that when the Catholic fathers fixed letters to the words of Kikongo, its poetry and stories poured into print with the force of a flood.

Anatole cradling me into forgiveness, while I rattled and shook with fever. Our marriage has been, for me, a very long convalescence.

I’ve been as transient in my adult life as anyone in our cooperative.

He stamped me with a belief in justice, then drenched me in culpability, and I wouldn’t wish such torment even on a mosquito.

He brings drought sometimes, followed by torrential rains, and if these things aren’t always what I had in mind, they aren’t my punishment either.

Hereabouts, where we sit among such piles of leftover protein we press it into cakes for the pets, who usefully guard our empty chairs; here where we pay soothsayers and acrobats to help lose our weight, then yes, for a child to die from hunger is immoral.

This is the story I believe in: When God was a child, the Rift Valley cradled a caldron of bare necessities, and out of it walked the first humans upright on two legs.

As a teenager reading African parasitology books in the medical library, I was boggled by the array of creatures equipped to take root upon a human body.

I have made important discoveries about the AIDS and Ebola viruses. As a consequence, I must sometimes appear at public functions where I am lauded as a saviour of the public health.

Rachel is clearly the one with locks on every possible route to defenestration.

Grandchildren, then, the woman insists, and so after more deliberation they pick out three ebony elephants for the children of the children.