Love in the Driest Season

A 'Philadelphia' for Africa

Reviewed by Thom J. Rose - February 23, 2004 Monday

Long-time foreign correspondent and current Washington Post reporter Neely Tucker says his book "Love in the Driest Season" is not a story about AIDS in Africa. It might, however, be just the book to put a human face on the epidemic.

Like "Philadelphia," the movie that gave many Americans a personal connection to AIDS in the United States, Tucker's book allows readers to connect with a huge problem by focusing on its human details -- in this case a tiny Zimbabwean orphan girl named Chipo.

The book, which Tucker calls a family memoir, follows its author and his wife as they struggle through Zimbabwe's Kafkaesque bureaucracy to adopt a single little girl in an AIDS-wracked country where more than 500,000 children are orphaned each year.

"It's not a newspaper story," Tucker told United Press International. "It's far more intimate."

That distinction is an important one for Tucker, who admits at the beginning of the book that he has been rendered cold and distant after having covered crisis after crisis in Africa and elsewhere for the Detroit Free Press.

It is perhaps an equally important distinction for his readers, who -- considering the general first-world apathy toward African suffering -- are often left cold by newspaper reports of incomprehensibly brutal African disasters.

"Love in the Driest Season" chronicles Tucker's rude awakening and eventual escape from his professional journalistic distance.

"Keep moving, I had told myself time and again," Tucker writes of the moment he met Chipo. "Don't think. But when the child's fingers closed over mine, some long-forgotten part of me seemed to stir. I didn't know what it was. I just felt something."

That moment marks the beginning of a radical change in Tucker's life. He begins to focus less and less on his reporting, and more and more on Chipo's adoption. He abandons his objective distance for personal involvement, takes an extended leave from reporting and eventually quits altogether.

Tucker experiences Zimbabwe's orphan crisis not as a journalist, but as a hopeful adoptive parent.

"So it came to be that one of the most momentous stories of our time fell into my lap, there at the end of the world, the tale of an entire generation of abandoned and dying children, and I knew it to the bone," Tucker wrote. "I had the sources, the data, the feel of daily life in an orphanage at the heart of the problem, exacting detail that none of my colleagues could ever match, and the record will show I never filed a single story. ... The fact was that the millions of children on the continent did not have my heart. One of them did."

Instead of using his contacts to help illustrate the extent of the orphan crisis, Tucker saved them to help him navigate Zimbabwe's adoption process, which is strongly prejudiced against foreigners. Instead of writing tough stories about ineffectual government responses, he remained silent -- not wanting to hurt his chances of saving Chipo.

Now, however, Tucker's journalistic restraint has paid off in a unique book that stands to spark an awareness of Africa and AIDS in a way that scores of newspaper articles have not.

In place of journalistic objectivity, Tucker offers the voice of someone who truly and personally cares.

He includes the now-familiar daunting statistics -- 10 million orphans in Africa, 25 percent of Zimbabweans between the ages of 25 and 44 thought to be HIV positive, the average Zimbabwean life span shortened from 56 years to 38 -- but only as the background for what is in the end a hopeful story.

"I think it's sobering, but I don't think it's depressing," Tucker said.

The book portrays its share of misery and death, but it ends with Tucker, his wife Vita and a healthy Chipo living in Washington.

Perhaps most important, Tucker succeeds in taking a problem so dire and so huge that few can truly comprehend it and distilling its essence into a gripping story about a single abandoned little girl.

Tucker acknowledges there is plenty of reason for despair in Africa, but added, "On an individual basis, yes, you can make progress."

"Love in the Driest Season" provides a starting point. It reproduces Africa on a scale that the individual can understand.

Not that Tucker admits to any such lofty goal.

"We certainly hope it brings an awareness at the very minimum that there are thousands and thousands just like (Chipo)," he said.

He added, however, "The main reason the book was written was for my daughter to have."

That motivation sums up the book's power well. By focusing on a single person touched by AIDS rather than the epidemic itself, Tucker expresses its importance with impressive force.