After a childhood marked by abuse, addiction, and neglect, the 18-year-old Baker was ready to go out into the world and do some good. The young Australian graphic artist volunteered for a mission trip to the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, where she worked in a print shop and assisted locals. “I want my life to have significance and meaning,” she remembers thinking as her plane landed at a remote jungle airstrip, “and I want to live as if these were my last days on Earth, to offer hope to the hopeless and be a voice to the voiceless.” The author’s three months in the village of Tari were unexpectedly healing, and she returned to Sydney prepared to ask forgiveness from the people she had wronged in her youth—and to offer forgiveness to those people, including her father and her old boss, who had abused her in the past. Baker decided to pursue a degree in theology and dedicate her life to providing aid and doing development work in places like Bangladesh, Zambia, Kenya, and Indonesia, though it was not always easy to keep past traumas from flaring up, particularly during her time at home. “Away from Sydney, I found my voice and felt alive,” she writes; “back in Sydney, I felt stifled.” Baker’s memoir examines the limitations of trying to outrun the past, even when doing good things in far corners of the world. The author is a skilled travel writer, and the missionary sections are often striking. The portions in which Baker explores her own feelings are often harder to follow, as she has a tendency to offer little context and to discuss her emotional states in abstract language: “The fragmented pieces of my once shattered self, lost amid ruins that had left only fragility, had merged into a bridge bathed in the light of shared purpose, built from the raw material of vulnerability and healing.” Greater clarity and organization would improve this often-compelling work.
