1. April There is a terrible moment in The Collector of Treasures, a volume of stories by the late Bessie Head, a biracial South African writer. The story is called "The Wind and a Boy." In it, Head writes of a grandmother called Sejosenye who is devastated when she learns of the death of her grandchild, Friedman. Friedman is the pride of Sejosenye''s life, her reason for living. A policeman delivers the news of Friedman''s death to her: The boy has been knocked off his bicycle by a truck and run over. It is the only time the policeman appears in the story. It is the grandmother''s agonized response to the news that has always haunted me.

"Can''t you return those words back?" she asks him, as if death has no more permanence than an item purchased in a store. Her simple question reverberates with pain. The policeman--the figure of authority to whom Sejosenye appeals--is powerless to comply with her request, much as he may wish to return her beautiful grandson to her. Devastated by her loss, Sejosenye succumbs to death soon afterwards. There was a terrible moment on CNN on April 16, 2007, when Virginia Tech police chief Wendell Flinchum confirmed the rumors swirling around the campus. Reporters asked him to approximate how many had been killed: More than twenty, he said. The room full of reporters, accustomed though they were to bad news, gasped. I gasped, too.

Everything refused to behave normally after that. I believe I sat perfectly still on the sofa for several seconds repeating what he''d said. More than twenty? Impossible! Can''t you return those words back? I wanted to rush out of my house and into the street--turn left at the end of the driveway then left again onto Countryside Court, the road that had seemed pretty to me before but which ends in a cul-de-sac (something I should have remembered)--turn right onto North Main and run for two solid miles until I hit the mall--turn right at the chapel where I was married to a VT alumnus thirteen years before--skirt the Drillfield and hurry up the wide stone steps of Burruss Hall and find Chief Flinchum to demand that he return those words back to where they came from because how would we bear it if he didn''t? How would parents tearing down I-81 in a futile effort to arrive in time to save their children begin to comprehend what had happened? How would they survive without their beautiful sons and daughters who had come to Virginia Tech to learn in safety with us? Earlier that morning, I was sitting in my favorite chair, cradling my cup of tea. The tea was in a mug my husband, Larry, had ordered from some company online. A photo of my former executive assistant, Tammy Shepherd, and me had been glazed into the side. Tammy and I have our arms around each other''s shoulders and we''re grinning at the camera. We became friends during the four years when I served as chair of English. Tammy helped me wade through budget sheets and annual reports; she was a courageous ally when I was meeting with students who were in distress, insisting that she stay close by with her door open, even when I felt that it may be risky for her to do so.

"You don''t have a choice," she would tell me. "I''m staying." I was thinking about that evening''s class. That semester, I was teaching my graduate poetry workshop on Mondays from 6:00 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. It had turned out to be one of the most enjoyable and fulfilling classes I had ever taught.

Although I was still codirecting the Creative Writing program, I had stepped down from the position of chair of Virginia Tech''s English department nearly a year before. Now that I was no longer responsible for overseeing a department of fifty professors, more than fifty instructors, seven classified staff, and dozens of graduate students, I had more time to devote to teaching. We were approaching the end of the semester and I needed to make sure that my comments on the drafts of the student poems were helpful. Outside the weather was unseasonable--blustery, positively mean. A biting wind whipped the field behind our house, and the grass writhed with such synchronized beauty that it looked as if the entire field were underwater. There were even a few snow flurries. The walk from the car park to Shanks Hall where I taught the graduate workshop would be very chilly. I needed to remember to retrieve my winter coat from the back of the closet.

I had risen early that morning with a sense of foreboding. I knew exactly where it came from: I had been consumed with thoughts about Sierra Leone where I had taught at the age of twenty-one. Larry and I had visited the country at the end of 2006, hoping to form partnerships between Sierra Leone and Virginia Tech. It had been something of a personal pilgrimage. I needed to find out if students I had taught, and a family with whom I had been close, had survived the horrifying civil war. The ghosts from that country--the murdered villagers, the amputees who hobbled through the streets begging for food--populated my nightmares. I refused to accept the fact that, in all likelihood, most of the students I had taught as a young woman had been killed or had died by now. It had been nearly thirty years since then, and I hadn''t been much older than they were.

The average life span in Sierra Leone even before the war was around forty years old. In preparation for our trip back to West Africa, I had read firsthand accounts of the slaughter and amputations by rebels, and by children who had been forcibly conscripted into a juvenile army. The horror of what had transpired during a decadelong civil war made the infamous Children''s Crusade seem like a day-care excursion. But when we arrived in Sierra Leone we were greeted by some remarkable news: The family I had been close to had survived. All their children, including the one named after me, had survived also. The family had lost one grandchild. And although it looked likely that many of my former students and their families had not survived the war, some were living safely in places like Guinea or Mali, and a few were said to be in the United States. I had celebrated with old friends and promised new friends we met that we would find a way to do something constructive to help with the rebuilding process.

I had an obligation to give something back because it was in Sierra Leone that I learned, like so many of Bessie Head''s female characters, to find abiding joy in simple things. My African students were the ones who had reminded me how precious education was, and how few people around the world had access to it. I had taught in Sierra Leone for two years as a volunteer in the United Kingdom''s VSO program (Voluntary Service Overseas), the British equivalent of the Peace Corps. My Jamaican father had always told my English mother that Africa was home. He was right. In those two years in Sierra Leone I began to comprehend that lasting happiness could be wrung from very little. Now that I was back in Blacksburg I had to work hard to keep my trip to Sierra Leone in the forefront of my imagination. The contrast between here and there was shocking, and the challenges posed by Sierra Leone''s stuttering postwar economy were profound.

It was difficult to know how best to partner with a country so impoverished that it lacked the most basic infrastructure. I had promised myself that I would find a way to do it, but I was concerned that I may have bitten off more than I could chew. The country was even less developed than it had been at the end of the seventies: a local currency that was almost worthless, no trustworthy banks or postal system, no credit cards (the banks in the country had been blacklisted because card numbers routed through the financial system were routinely stolen), appalling slums, a wounded populace, and a fragile government. And yet, in spite of all that, the resilience of the people was inspiring, and their friendliness touched me deeply. When I went back there, I had been welcomed like an old friend. Prior to our journey, Larry and I had joined forces with another professor at Virginia Tech, Ed Smith, who came from Sierra Leone. On a trip home himself, he had met us at Lunghi airport when we had visited. Having Ed as a guide made it a much more productive experience than it would otherwise have been.

Upon our return to Blacksburg in January, I found solace in the serenity of the mountains and the peacefulness of the small college town. I had the luxury of recharging my batteries at Virginia Tech before returning refreshed to Sierra Leone for another visit. I turned on CNN, something I have done habitually since 9/11. I was alone in the house. Larry, a computer systems network engineer and a classified staff person in the chemistry department at Virginia Tech, was working in the electronics shop in Davidson Hall. His office cubicle faces the Drillfield, the most recognizable feature of the Tech campus. He has a wonderful view out onto the center of campus at one side of the Drillfield, which functions as both hub and gathering place for students. The huge common area of grass and footpaths is where students throw Frisbees during the warmer months or hurry to class from their dorms located on the other side of the Drillfield from most of the classroom and administrative buildings.

Burruss Hall dominates, with its castlelike appearance and its multicolored limestone facade, sitting majestically at the top of an imposing flight of stone steps. This is the seat of Virginia Tech''s central administration--where the offices of the president, the provost, the treasurer, the vice presidents, the vice provosts, and other administrators are located. Suddenly CNN was showing a map of Virginia. It took me a moment to realize that Blacksburg was being highlighted. Something was going on-- a shooting incident on campu.