A Place Set for Me

"There is no one here whom I will be dying to see again." Peter O'Neil wrote that home the week he left Cameroon. This is the story of how wrong he was. 

In 1988 he landed in Bangem, a mountain village in the anglophone region of Cameroon, an engineer with zero teaching experience, assigned to a classroom with no glass in the windows. He figured he'd stay two years, do some good, and head home.

Then three boys showed up at his door with a broom. A widow named Mami Elizabeth set a place for him at her fire and called him her child. And a village that barely knew him decided he didn't need to be alone anymore.

A Place Set for Me follows those two years, and the thirty-five that came after. Fufu and chevron beads. The cord in the discipline master's drawer. Two dollars between a child and malaria. The night the women pulled him into the dance. A place with little of what the world calls wealth, and far more of the other kind than he had ever imagined.

It is also the story of a question his father once asked, and of the answer that arrived only years later: not what he was running from, but what he was running toward.

A Place Set for Me is a companion to Chai & Chapati, O'Neil's memoir of two years teaching in India, and a book about the kind of belonging you can only be given, by people whose lives look nothing like your own.

Includes a reading-group guide and a recipe for groundnut stew.