I came downstairs to find Sam already in the dining room, leering at the woman sitting with him at the table. We’d met the day before, and he had been as much of a shithead as Bonnie has promised. Grateful that I didn’t need to be stuck with him in a car all day, I walked over to them, bracing for whatever asinine thing would come out of his mouth. I’d only spent a few hours with him and was already completely over his frat bro posturing.

When I got to the table, I first turned to the woman and offered my hand. She was tall and slender, with beautiful golden-brown skin. Even in her jeans, hiking boots, and long-sleeved Aid USA T-shirt, she was stunning. I assumed this was our statistician, who had arrived late yesterday and had not made it to dinner.

“Hi, you must be Tsehay. I’m Desta.”

She immediately stood up and grabbed my shoulder to do the double-kiss-and-embrace greeting that was compulsory for Ethiopians. My mother being Dominican, I was used to a kiss hello and goodbye, and after just a few days, I’d grown comfortable with the ritual. Ethiopians didn’t wave or do hurried handshakes. No, a greeting was a moment of pause and connection that said “I want to show you how good it is to see you.”

I responded to Tsehay’s greeting in kind. She beamed at me as we pulled back. “You’re like Habesha, Desta! With your name and such a proper greeting, you could fool anyone.”

I laughed at how serious she seemed. “I’m glad you approve.”

I turned to Sam, who had a puzzled look on his face, like he wasn’t one hundred percent sure what my agenda was with Tsehay. I did my best to suppress my eye roll as I went to sit down across from him. “Hey Sam, how’s it going?”

“Hey yourself.” I was almost impressed by how he could make those two words sound like a full recrimination. “I was just going over the survey with Tsehay.”

I glared at him, annoyed at his shitty pronunciation of her name. It was just seh-high, simple. Yet he somehow managed to butcher it. He’d done the same thing last night with some of the other team members we had dinner with.

“Just making sure she understands what we need to get out of the qualitative questions. We don’t want people to give us their life story. Just what worked and what didn’t about the program.”

He then turned to Tsehay and started speaking in that annoying enunciated English that some Westerners used when talking to locals in developing countries. Hammering every single syllable to death and sounding out every vowel and consonant, like they were teaching kindergarteners the alphabet.

So fucking condescending.