Single, burned out and on the cusp of forty, Irish-Nigerian New Yorker Pamela Brown-Peterside is yearning for meaning when she exchanges a stable US career in HIV research for the lush but AIDS-hit valleys of western Uganda. Ambivalent about missions, Pamela unwittingly joins an American missionary-medical couple committed to preventing HIV infections in newborns. Within days she learns they have to leave and she finds herself alone and in charge. Confronted by personal illness, ever-present death and a devastating Ebola outbreak, Pamela faces uncomfortable questions of identity, sacrifice and calling even as the AIDS programme succeeds.