How many young women decide to leave their husband-to-be at the altar and run off to join the Peace Corps? After graduating from college in 1971, 21-year-old Laurel Bittelson finds she has a burning desire not for marriage, but to pursue 1960's style "relevance" in her life. Although she'd never been further from her Boston home than Vermont, she leaves fiancé, friends, family, and her music behind to live and teach in Uganda, East Africa. What she has no way of knowing is that her life will be changed forever, as she falls in love with an African man in a country heading into chaos under the brutal Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin Dada. For Laurel, in so many ways, there would be no going back.