Mark G. Wentling’s impressive career in international development has led him all over the world, including 50 years working across the entire continent of Africa, focusing on different regions and specific countries. That experience has offered plenty of inspiration for his previous novels and memoirs, but the idea for his latest book, Falling Seven Times, actually came from a conversation in his kitchen in Lubbock, Texas, when he asked his Ethiopian wife, Almaz, what she thought he should write about next. “She told me that I should write about her, about her life,” Mark explains. “She couldn’t remember much, but she remembered having to be a labor migrant.”

What Almaz could remember of her harrowing journeys to Dubai, Corfu, and even being captured in Iraq on her way to Turkey, was a surprise to Wentling—they had not previously discussed the struggles of her early life before the two met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 15 years ago. But Wentling immediately recognized that her story reflected a painful reality shared by millions and a concerning issue in international development. “Two hundred eighty-one million, or 3.6% of the world’s population,” Wentling says, citing the most recent figures from the International Organization for Migration on how many people are forced to seek work outside their home country. “That’s how many there are, and the number is growing.”

Wentling’s long career in international issues began in 1967. At the time, he was a student at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas, near the small towns where he grew up. “At the time, campuses were in an uproar,” Wentling says of the climate of the late 1960s. He was drawn to the Peace Corps recruiters nearby offering something different and exotic. “I wanted to go away, and they gave me the opportunity,” he says.

Wentling spent two years with the Peace Corps in Honduras before returning to Kansas and finishing his B.A. with combined majors in economics, political science, and anthropology. But he was so eager to get back out on the field that he didn’t even wait to pick up his diploma before rejoining the Peace Corps and heading to Togo.

In Africa, Wentling became a Peace Corps director and was eventually recruited by USAID (United States International Agency for Development). Over the next several decades, he boomeranged between various African countries and the United States, where he continued his education, obtaining master’s degrees in tropical agriculture economics and international strategic studies from Cornell in 1983 and the U.S. National War College in 1992, respectively.

Political upheaval was also a factor in several of his moves: In 1992, Wentling became the first USAID director for Angola, for example, but was evacuated after just two weeks back to Washington. “And there, we were discussing Somalia, and they looked around the table and said to me, ‘Well, you didn’t get Angola, so now you get Somalia!’” Wentling says with a laugh as he relates how his work progressively took him from one country to another.

By the time Wentling officially retired in 2023, he had completed work in Cambodia and Nepal. He had also lived in, or at least visited, all 54 African countries—a major accomplishment, even among Wentling’s very international colleagues. It was a deputy ambassador to Nigeria who had pointed out to him that he only needed Libya to have seen all of Africa, leading Wentling to hop on a flight for a quick stop in Tripoli. “I would go to these countries, and even if it was just for a short time, I would send myself a postcard to prove I’d been there,” Wentling says. “And I still have that Libyan postcard! I just found it the other day.”

Wentling has been the author of numerous professional articles, sharing his expertise and analysis, but he decided to pivot to writing novels after suffering a major heart attack in Ghana in 2010. He had spent days clinging to life before being evacuated to Johannesburg, South Africa, for proper medical care. (“Over there,” Wentling explains, “you might call 911, and the ambulance only comes three days later.”) What he took away from the experience was that it was time to start writing about everything he had seen in his travels. “I just thought that if I didn’t start writing soon, I might die and never do it.”

Since then, Wentling has produced several novels set in Honduras and in his home state of Kansas. For Africa, he produced a memoir (Africa Memoir: 50 Years, 54 Countries, One American Life, 2020) and a trilogy of novels following the adventures of a young man from Kansas. Falling Seven Times, published in 2024, builds on his previous themes of perseverance and struggle through the story of Alya, who follows the same path that Wentling’s wife did in real life.

Kirkus Reviews found that with Falling Seven Times, “Wentling paints a thorough and horrifying portrait of people caught up in a brutal system, illuminating the complex trials and humiliating experiences that migrant workers endure.” At the novel’s opening, the young Alya can only find an escape from intense hunger when she sleeps, and there seems to be no solution to the extreme poverty all around her Addis Ababa neighborhood:

The poor neighbors living in the makeshift hovels next door were full of ideas of what she could do to earn the money she needed to buy food, but all their suggestions took time to realize. She did not have the luxury of time. Her family needed to eat now. She was worried deeply about how they would get through the day. It made her angry when her neighbors told her things that would take days to achieve, if ever. Her problem was more immediate.

“It’s fiction, but it’s based on a true life story,” Wentling explains. As Alya’s story progresses, she becomes involved with “brokers” who send her to Dubai to work as a housemaid. There, she is able to send money home but at great cost to her health and safety. Alya must consistently flee households and entire countries in search of a stable position, but the journeys only become more harrowing, eventually taking her all the way to Iraq at the height of the Iraq war.

Wentling wrote Falling Seven Times largely while working in Kathmandu, Nepal, where he learned that 25% of the local GDP depended on remittances: payments from workers abroad who, just like Alya and Almaz, had to leave home to make a living. Every night in Kathmandu, Wentling called his wife over WhatsApp to get more information about her perilous journey and how she felt navigating foreign lands. “I called them signposts,” Wentling says of the details his wife supplied. “I just needed a few signposts, and then I could connect them with research.”

By sharing his wife’s story, Wentling hopes to raise awareness among American readers who don’t understand the situation that millions around the world face, which is still very much a reality for Wentling’s family. (“We just went to Western Union to send money to Ethiopia,” he says. “If a household doesn’t have a worker abroad, they can’t make ends meet.”)

Wentling also hopes that Falling Seven Times will spark both interest and empathy at a time when the United States’ involvement in international development is in question. Since returning to live in the U.S. in 2015, Wentling has found that people tend to be generally uninterested in Africa or have a reductive idea about the continent that is not representative of the 54 different countries Wentling has known. “It’s a shame,” Wentling says, “It’s such a huge place with so many amazing, different cultures.” Wentling hopes that by sharing his and his wife’s stories, others will start to see Africa in the same way.

Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris, France.