It's 1986, and the famine machinery is humming in Ethiopia. It's been two years since the greatest famine of the twentieth century has been uncovered with the deaths of half a million and counting. Clinic nurse Emma Smith, alone and rattled in the remote village of Godo, hears that a new nurse, Reece Myers, is coming and welcomes him with open arms. What begins as a working relationship under trying conditions buds into a likely romance, but Reece is engaged to a woman back home and soon finds himself at the wrong end of an AK-47, dashing Emma's hopes.