That summer I helped research the asylum case of a woman named Daro. She was a refugee from Senegal. Her problems had started when she resisted the cutting rituals of her tribe. She used her hands to show us, held her palms in a V above her crotch and then rubbed two fingers together. She fled her village—had been, she said, “run out”—and then suffered persecution at the hands of distant cousins in Dakar.

I transcribed interviews that my mother conducted through two translators: to French, then Wolof, then back again. Mom’s voice was scratchy on the tape recorder: “Why do your cousins persecute you?”

There was a shuffling farther back, a circling game of telephone. “They think she have disrespected her village,” the translator said. “But she did not want the knife for her daughters.”

I went to my mother’s bed that night and lay next to her. “You were right,” I whispered. “It’s terrible.”

I wondered if she’d given me this case to prove a point, to show me how wrong I’d been. I’d told her something terrible and false about the world, about innocent people’s lives, to show that I was not the same person she was. I remembered Daro’s voice, the sorrow marking up her foreign tongue, and started crying.

“Don’t cry,” my mother said. “Just help.”

So I tried: I searched Daro’s name on the Internet. I typed: “Daro Izowede + persecution.” And then: “Daro Izowede + defying tradition.” The only thing that came up was a list of personal ads. Daro had made one before she left Dakar. It showed her face in profile—the thumb-sized photo, her long acrylic nails spread like a fan across her cheek. My hello phrase is I am looking for a man to love I do not know the name.

At the office I printed out pages of information from human rights websites. I highlighted all the parts that were about rural rituals, or rural violence, or sexual violence, or mutilation, or getting married. I made neat folders with neat labels. It felt good to stack them on my mother’s desk. I said, “I hope these make a difference.”

“They will,” she said. She rose from her chair and shook my hand.