I met Francis when leaving a shop in a small town . In a place where white faces are rare one does not simply pass by; one says hello. And, to my surprise, he turned out to be Irish like I am myself.

Francis had been working as a priest for a missionary order in a remote corner of north-west Mozambique. Slightly balding at thirty, with a face tending to roundness, he wore a quick, boyish grin that split his lips sideways and a twinkle that suggested mischief. He looked well-fed and in need of a little exercise to tame an expanding waistline.

He had returned from Ireland only a few months earlier, after doing the hardest thing he had ever done: telling both his family and the religious order that he was leaving the priesthood and marrying a Mozambican woman. The civil marriage was done; it would help him renew his residency. Now he needed a job badly — his savings were nearly gone.

There was a possible opening in the local branch of a supermarket chain, but he refused to apply. That was where the other Holy Ghost Fathers shopped when they came in from the bush. He couldn’t bear the thought of meeting them; they were very much “against him” at the moment.

He had met his wife when she was a nurse in a hospital he visited as part of his priestly duties. Yes, he admitted, he had fallen for her immediately. For now they were living with her parents.

She was not working because she suffered severe headaches that flared suddenly from a single point on her skull. Weeks would go by without trouble, then one morning it would strike and last for days—violent, blinding, unexplained. Neither the doctors nor a scan had revealed anything.

It was Francis who had suggested that perhaps someone she didn’t know had once given her something to eat. She thought he might be right. Did he believe in witchdoctors? Yes, he said, without hesitation. He had seen their power first-hand. I wondered aloud if some other woman might have had her eye on him and resented the “scheming nurse” who had got there first. Possibly, he conceded. In any case, he now refused to accept food from strangers.

I shivered slightly as he walked away. It seemed quite a load for a young man from Newry to carry as he stepped into a completely different life.