In her first novel, Hazel Reitz, a former State Department refugee officer and now a board member of the Women's Refugee Commission, draws on her visits to Eastern Chad to monitor the situation of 250,000 refugees who fled the fighting in Darfur and took refuge in a remote region on the border with Sudan. The heroine, Samantha James, flees her medical position at a San Francisco hospital to escape the pain and gossip of a broken marriage and takes a job with an international medical group working in the refugee camps. Broken-hearted and unprepared for the vagaries of life in one of the most desolate and poverty-stricken places on earth, Sam struggles with the hellish heat, the omnipresent legions of bugs, the lack of comfort, and the medical challenges of treating the refugees. These problems, however, fade into insignificance when she attracts the admiration of a young refugee leader and finds herself caught up in horrors of the war. Exacerbating the situation is the apparent disdain towards her of the United Nations refugee official in charge of the humanitarian operation. As Sam struggles to deal with the ordeals that befall her, her commitment to her refugee patients, particularly the women and children, and her admiration for the humanitarian workers struggling to help them grows stronger. The affection of a small boy and the prospect of a new love bind Sam even more closely to this desert land.