'"C'est l'arrivee," someone said. These were the first words the boy heard when the lorry on which he and the others had been travelling at last turned into the parking lodge at Bulungu, their final destination after a two-day journey from Kinshasa. The boy was impatient to find out more about this place, which might soon become his permanent home. With his little brain he had imagined that people everywhere lived like the people at his birthplace.'
The idea of clashes or differences between cultures didn't make sense to the young boy who is sent by his international parents to a country village for his social education. For him, everybody, everywhere, had the same family structures, the same moral values, the same needs--the vision of different cultures was elusive if not beyond his grasp. But the impact of this new cultural environment, this formative excursion into the heart of the African darkness, will change his life--and destiny.
