Full Circle by Davis Bunn Page A

she would talk about her mother. Or explain why her father preferred not to sit behind the wheel of such a machine. But Kayla remained as she was, watching the lane ahead, in silence. And Adam decided not to ask anything more just then, content with the easy silence and the day.
    They bought cheese, stone-ground bread, and apples from a village shop. They ate at a stream with a rock as both table and bench. The valley was steep-sided, shielding them from the wind. Sheep supplied the entertainment, calling in cadence to the rushing water.
    Adam decided it was time to ask, “Would you tell me about your project?”
    Kayla stared at the water. “It all seems a million miles away right now.”
    â€œForget the bad stuff. Practically all I’ve heard so far has been about the guy and the damage. Tell me the good.”
    She looked at him. The sun played upon her gaze, turning it to russet gemstone, clear as the stream that rushed beside them. “There was a lot of it. The good. A lot.”
    It seemed the most natural thing in the world to do as she had done in the coffee shop. Adam reached over and took hold of her gloved hand.
    Kayla stared at the two hands, one bared and the other in leather. Adam waited for her to break the moment and say they needed to be getting on. But when Kayla lifted her hand free, it was merely to slip the glove off. She settled her fingers back into his and said, “How much do you know about Oxfam?”
    â€œThe name only.”
    â€œIn the middle of the Second World War, the college chapels got together with the city churches and founded the Oxford Famine Relief Committee. Their aim was to bring food and shelter to the innocents of Greece and Netherlands who had been made homeless by the war. Other British cities set up similar groups, but Oxfam was the only one that kept going after the war. Oxfam now operates in seventy-four countries. They are often the first to bring supplies to disaster-hit regions and the last to leave. Their aim is not merely to feed and shelter the destitute, but once the crisis is under control, to help rebuild shattered lives.
    â€œBefore the drought struck East Africa, Oxfam helped start a worldwide project called the Fair Trade Initiative. In many of the poorest countries, farmers who raise the crops receive almost none of the profits. They are told what to grow by middlemen, who then pay them in seed and supplies, creating modern servitude. Oxfam sought to break this stranglehold by taking the place of the middlemen and giving all the profits back to the farmers and their villages.”
    The sun touched the lip of the western slopes. Instantly the sky overhead was filled with an orchestral array. Every tree, every rocky outcropping, became a symphony of light and tone. Adam drank in the day and the brook and the country-side perfumes, knowing Kayla was no longer entirely there beside him. She had drifted away, captured by a hot and dusty realm.
    â€œNo one expected the level of success Oxfam experienced with this project. Nowadays, many of Europe’s supermarket chains have entire aisles for Fair Trade products. The result has been an anchoring of entire regions. Villagers were no longer giving up on land their families had farmed for generations and migrating to the cities. Why should they, when they could remain where they were and earn a decent wage and send their children to school and preserve their way of life.” Kayla was silent for a moment before adding, “Then disaster struck.”
    Adam guessed, “The drought.”
    â€œOxfam is now the major supplier of food and shelter to nine hundred thousand people in East Africa. The problem is, more than four million people are starving. Oxfam’s central committees in Kenya and Tanzania and Ethiopia and Eritrea had to make a critical choice—continue to support the Fair Trade projects or feed the starving. They really had no option, not when faced with the