Chris before going to Panama to commence his American adventures. A painting of the great man hangs in the vestibule along with portraits of UA’s first two chancellors. It’s early Thursday afternoon, and Mark is lying in his recliner, awake. Foiling his efforts at an afternoon nap before council starts are memories of his first and last conversations with Grace at UA. At the time he had been both Head of Department and Dean. Though she was only a part-time member of the faculty, come to do research for her doctoral thesis, she’d made a splash by publishing a paper entitled “A Model for Real Time (RT), Real Circumstance (RC), Tailor-Made Interventions (TMI) in Communities Affected by Vector-Transmitted Diseases.” It had got attention as far afield as the World Bank. Because she’d arrived with funding and wasn’t just any old grad student, he’d duly stopped by to check on how she’d settled in. “Hi, Miss Carpenter. Are you very busy?”
