In August 1962, a group of Peace Corps Volunteers crossed the Atlantic Ocean to become teachers in the secondary schools of Sierra Leone, a little known country on the West Coast of Africa at that time. My Heart Is like a Cabbage recounts in painful detail the missteps one of those Volunteers made trying to respond to President John F. Kennedy's new experiment in foreign affairs: a cadre largely composed of young college graduates charged to work together with "the citizens of the world . . . for the freedom of man." Plucked from middleclass America and in the space of a day set down in the "White Man's grave," the author carries with him a troubling mixture of cynicism and idealism, naivete and the subconscious arrogance of his American birthright. Only marginally prepared for the teaching position he will assume and the cultural and language challenges he will face, he blunders into failed relationships with colleagues, students and other citizens of his host country. Regrettably, tutored as he has been during his college years in the mantra of carpe diem, he is drawn into an intimate relationship with one of his female students. As he searches for both his identity as a man and as an ambassador of his country, he ultimately must face the fact that he has failed at both."