As part of the CityForge model, local leaders were trained to film the village’s gradual transformation. The videos gave the mentors in the developed world a way to follow the progress of the villages. In almost real time, city council leaders, mayors, police chiefs, and others could see the villages change, and could offer guidance. Individual donors could also follow the villages’ progress, like a reality show, seeing how the money they provided was improving the lives of the current residents and laying the groundwork for generations to come.

The CityForge founders had come up with the idea while they were undergraduates at UNC-Chapel Hill, and after graduating this past May, they had set out to make their concept a reality. They had spent the summer promoting their startup and raising money from friends, family, and passionate supporters. They used the funds for their trip to Kenya, where they planned to document every stop along the way—and identify their first “CityForge villages.” And, for reasons that remained unclear to Peyton, the two boys had made a pact not to shave or cut their hair during the trip.

She clicked the Supporters page and read the names. Icarus Capital was among the corporate sponsors. She had seen the name before—hours ago, in her apartment. It was Desmond Hughes’s investment firm. Was he involved in some way? She thought it was an odd coincidence, but she couldn’t think of a way to act on the connection.

Even thinking about Desmond rattled her. She fought to stay focused.

Another tab on the CityForge site featured a map with every stop the two young men had made. Most included one or more videos of the two Americans touring the village and doing interviews with residents. Mostly, they highlighted how infrastructure could change the villagers’ lives. For a few of the villages, the videos continued after the two Americans had left. The more recent films had been uploaded by village leaders hoping to attract financial supporters.

The trip log was a dream for an epidemiologist. Peyton wondered if one of the videos would show the origin of the outbreak. She might even be able to track its spread.

The key to stopping an outbreak was containment. The first step in containment was to isolate anyone who was infected, and the second step was to interview all the infected patients and develop a list of every person they had come into contact with—a process called contact tracing. From those contacts, Peyton and her team would begin a repeating process. They would search for contacts. If the contact was sick, they would isolate them and trace anyone they had come into contact with; if the contact was asymptomatic, they would test them for the disease and typically quarantine them until Peyton and her team could be sure the person was infection-free. For Ebola, that quarantine period was twenty-one days. Eventually, when they had no new contacts to trace, they would end up with two groups: infected and quarantined.