1963 As European colonists flee the Congo, a witch doctor finds an abandoned child and teaches him the power of hatred. A hundred miles to the east, six American hippies on a joy ride across Africa, crash their VW bus into a cemetery. While they wait for repairs they scandalize the local missionaries and Brenda Carter impulsively marries an African student.

2013: Brenda Carter brings Sarah, her bright and determined granddaughter to Africa to explore her roots and meet her grandfather; the man Brenda married and abandoned fifty years before. When a Peace Corps worker is murdered, a baby is kidnapped, and all contact with the outside world is severed by a torrential rain storm, Sarah becomes an unwilling investigator into the abandoned boy from the Congo, the truth behind her grandmother's marriage, and fifty years of undercover CIA involvement in the politics of Africa.

A compelling tale of Africa today where witch doctors co-exist with modern medicine, warlords carry cell phones, and one small nation stands at the cross roads of America's War on Terror.