Crashing Through by Robert Kurson

future. Law school seemed the logical choice. There was honor and prestige in the profession, it allowed creative thinking, and it paid well. In 1975, the blind were lucky to have jobs, and those who did often ran vending stands or operated telephone switchboards. Law sounded right to him.
    Law school, however, would have to wait. When May discovered that a student could earn academic credit by studying abroad, his only question was, “Which country do I pick?” Many students chose places like England or France, but that seemed too easy to him. Ghana, in West Africa, did not. A professor had primed his interest in the area, and he’d had brushes with the country, as when he’d admired a friend’s Ashanti stool and when he met a Ghanaian gray parrot who could sing songs from television commercials. The sponsoring agency just needed to find a family for his six-month stay.
    No family wanted him. And they certainly did not want his new dog guide, a German shepherd named Totie. The Ghanaian military used dogs as attack animals; villagers did not know them as pets. The agency told May his trip would probably be canceled because of their inability to find him a family. But the group leader urged him to go anyway, saying they would figure it out when they got there.
    May and Totie became instant aliens in Ghana. Taxis refused to stop for them. Restaurants demanded that May sit outside. The staging dormitory for visiting students wouldn’t allow him in. May developed a system for hiding his dog from taxi drivers. When they stopped the car, he and Totie jumped in and refused to get out. The drivers would leap from their taxis and yell and protest, sometimes for fifteen minutes, but ultimately they had no choice but to get back in and drive.
    The agency continued to search for a host family as May tried to survive in Ghana’s capital, Accra. The streets were a gauntlet of broken sidewalks, open sewers, and maniac drivers. The blind in Ghana were well cared for but rarely seen in public. Locals followed May around town, shoving closer for a look at his strange animal and gathering in the hundreds to take in the spectacle.
    After three weeks in Accra, May still had no family. The agency put him on a van bound for a spartan coastal village called Kumbuli, near the Ivory Coast, where villagers had agreed that he could work and live. Kumbuli stretched just three hundred yards end to end and had no electricity or running water. Its cash crop, coconut palm oil, sustained the village chief, his four wives and thirty-six children, a population of four hundred, and a medicine man known as Mr. Natural. None of them knew what to make of May or Totie. On the day he arrived, May struggled to explain to excited villagers that his dog was not a gift of food to be butchered. They settled on a goat instead. May was expected to help slit its throat and bleed it, and he did so. He felt a very long way from Vic’s Ice Cream in Davis.
    The villagers put May to a decision: he could observe while they broke ground on a school or he could join them; they would be comfortable either way. He signaled that he was ready to work. They tried him at everything, and all of it was grueling—digging dirt, piling dirt, moving dirt, dumping dirt. He was fastest while carrying hundred-pound buckets on his head to a spot one hundred yards off-site, so that became his job, and May decided that he would drop from exhaustion before he let these people down, these people who didn’t understand him but who never questioned that he could do what they could, who had entrusted a man with ruined eyes to build a place to help their children know the world.
    Soon, May was a villager. He ate with the natives and played his guitar for them. They knew little English and he even less Nzema, but the villagers could sing along with a few of his songs, like “Jamaica Farewell” (“But I’m sad to say, I’m on my way…”) and harmonize to them all. He gorged on perfect