In 1997, journalist Neely Tucker was stationed in Zimbabwe, covering conflicts all over sub-Saharan Africa, when he lost his heart to a baby girl. Believing that he and his wife had a chance to provide the round-the-clock care needed to pull Chipo back from malnutrition and disease, Tucker struggled to rescue the child from an orphanage filled with abandoned, dying children.
But Tucker hadn't reckoned with the amazing stubbornness of the Zimbabwean bureaucracy. Official policy is dead set against foreigners (especially white foreigners) adopting native children; the country's fears about what rich Westerners could want with African babies are annoyingly unspecific, but that doesn't make the bureaucracy any less effective a barrier to the already-complicated process of transferring guardianship. In Love In The Driest Season, Tucker's passionate memoir of Chipo's deliverance, he and his wife try every tactic their international savvy has given them. They dot every "i" and cross every "t" on the reams of paper they're required to file—and then the file gets "lost" in a sea of folders in a chaotic sorting room, where they must find it themselves. They chase down every European, American, or Canadian who's ever successfully adopted a Zimbabwean child, only to hear everyone say that their quest is impossible. They offer to equip the state-run orphanage with modern appliances, basic sanitation, and food, only to have their generosity interpreted as bribery or attempts to intimidate with their relative wealth. They sit all day outside the offices of the officials whose approval they need, but who keep no regular office hours and don't take appointments. Finally, desperately, they make contingency plans to spirit Chipo out of the country illegally; the alternative, in their eyes, is to sentence her to death by returning her to the orphanage, where child after child, including two the Tuckers try to foster, succumbs to the officially denied AIDS epidemic.
Current-events reporting often exploits children for easy sympathy or cheap tears, but there's nothing easy or cheap about Tucker's wrenching story. Sure, it's impossible not to feel for Chipo (and for the 22 fellow orphans who die during the Tuckers' efforts), but it's the author's frustration, anger, and righteous obstinacy that twist the viscera and scratch insistently at the memory. As a bonus, the book provides an accurate yet personal account of the devastation wreaked by AIDS on the African continent. Lessons in world affairs are rarely so tragic, or so triumphant.