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The wind gets dust from the unpaved roadway one afternoon in December as Jack van Honk becomes a broken-down area in Lambert’s Bay, on the west coast of South Africa. A stocky lady in a red patterned sundress get out of a little home painted palest sea green, her ochre-dirt lawn crowded with potted plants, lots of medical. She smiles broadly, deep wrinkles creasing a face that is cherubic and yet careworn beyond her 47 years. “Doctor! I missed you,” she beams, her husky voice hardly more than a hoarse whisper.

Maria brings an unusual hereditary anomaly that is nearly unidentified beyond southern Africa. Its results have actually been to calcify a part of the brain called the basolateral amygdalaand to thicken and scar the singing cables. A good friend of Maria with the exact same condition lives numerous hours inland, and often they fulfill when van Honk brings them to Cape Town for brain scans and other tests. “It helps to know I’m not alone,” Maria states.

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