“In the beginning, the jungle had its way with me.” So begins the incredible saga of a young Peace Corps Volunteer, who finds himself teaching English in a remote hinterland school in the Ivory Coast in West Africa. The year is 1969, a time of ethnic turmoil and political uncertainty. Into this whirlpool of anxiety drops John Bagnole, who arrives with no cross-cultural training, weak French skills, and limited competence in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. Told with careful plotting, a keen wit, no-holds-barred farcical humor, and a well-honed, colorful, and sometimes bizarre vocabulary, the narrator’s unsatisfactory training background turns out to be the least of his problems, as he must deal with an anti-American French director, an amorphous gang of vicious pedophiles and gold thieves, the toils and dangers of life in the jungle, and an array of physical, emotional, and psychological tests of his mettle. What was expected to be a glorious two-year teaching and travel experience turns into an endless series of hijinks, misadventures, illusory romances, and death-defying encounters with illness and a cavalcade of good, evil, often peculiar, and memorable characters: a one-armed, scarified, albino Vatican policeman-cum-priest; an adorable young nun on the verge of leaving her order; fun-loving French girls teaching at a nearby mission school; the teaching staff of the local collège; a pied noir musician who suffers from lack of an instrument; seductresses of many colors and hues; a host of religious clerics; superstitious Africans bent on challenging and fending off magic spells from sorcerers, soothsayers, shamans, ancestral spirits, protector spouses, and animist spirits inhabiting l’Au-Delà (the Beyond) as well as the forbidden portions of the rainforest. As he makes his way in this totally alien society—only slightly assisted by Peace Corps staff and the inscrutable Dr. Black—our PCV narrator, armed with only his idealism, a positive outlook, a taste for pastis, a warm smile, and his manhood, discovers that he has embarked on a voyage of self-discovery that will test his resolve to do good, as he finds himself ineluctably heading for disaster and becoming intimately involved in an evil plot, so sickening and so disturbing, that he feels compelled to take action, himself, to end it once and for all!