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As Karima and I were printing the agenda, the phone rang. “Hello, Margaret. This is Chris from Portland.”

“Oh, hello. How’re you doing?” Chris was a donor who I had only met a few times. He found us through our website and loved both what we did and the letters I wrote. He was in his late twenties or early thirties and had made several generous donations over the last few years.

“I’m all right.” He paused. “Margaret, I’m in a position right now where I’d like to make a larger donation to Bahia Street. If I were to do this, what do you most need? Where would my donation be the most help?”

I smiled to myself. “Well, Chris. We have this loan for the building we bought. We have a grant to refurbish the building, but we have to repay the loan on top of raising the funds for the daily running of the Center. Any contribution you could make toward paying off that loan would be incredibly appreciated.”

“How much is the loan?”

I told him.

“Well.” He paused. I waited. “I think I could probably pay that off.” I sat down. “The entire thing?”

“Well, yeah. Actually why don’t we just round it up a few thousand and give you the extra to help with the refurbishment when the other money runs out?”

“You’re giving funds to repay the entire loan?” I realized I sounded stupefied and unprofessional.

“Yeah, yeah, we can do that. I’ll talk to my brother—he’ll be going into this with me—and my financial advisor on whether I should send one check or two or just order a money transfer. But yeah, I’m sure I can get you the funds by the end of the week.”

I tried to control the lump closing my throat. I coughed, hoping this would make my voice sound normal. “Um, Chris, that’s incredible. I’m not sure you know how much this means, particularly right now. Um, well, thank you.”

“I really support Bahia Street. I’m very impressed with what you all are accomplishing. This is a way I can contribute to making social change in the world. And I do know that what I give you here will make a difference.”

I took a deep breath and tried to pull myself together. “In November, we’re having the opening for the new building in Salvador,” I said. “If you and your brother would like to come, I’m sure everyone there would be delighted to meet you. Then you could see exactly where your money went.”

Chris laughed. “I’d love that. And I’ll bet my brother would as well. My father had always dreamed of owning a building or a hotel in Bahia. Perhaps this way, we’ll be fulfilling, in a certain way his dream.”

“That’s wonderful.” A tear slid over the edge of my eye. I quickly wiped it away. “Rita’s sending me photos of the building reconstruction as it progresses. I can send you copies of these if you like.”

“Oh.” Chris sounded genuinely surprised and delighted. “If it’s not imposing. I don’t want to intrude on private Bahia Street information, but I’d love to see those.”

“No, no Chris. You would not be intruding.”

I put down the phone and sat for a long moment in an anesthetized, suspended cocoon, swinging, swinging, amid a silence that blocked out cold wind or noise.

Karima had stopped working and was sitting watching me. “He’s going to pay off the entire loan?”

“More. Extra for the reconstruction as well as the loan.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“Yeah.”

Karima pushed herself to her feet. “Allah be praised,” she said. “Miracles happen.”

Just before the meeting, I checked my e-mails for a final time.

There was one from Henry. “I will not be attending the meeting,” he wrote. “Nor any meetings in the future. I feel I must leave the board because I have ethical differences with the way business is being conducted. Henry.”

The irony slapped me full in the face: on the same day Henry decided to quit we no longer had the loan that made him so nervous. But the nervousness was not really about the loan. It was about control and fear of the unknown. And, for Henry, being a lawyer, he had real liability issues the rest of us didn’t have. Also, neither Henry nor James