“Sometimes they were all there together, chatting in one room, and the rest of us would bring our chairs nearby to listen. We would creep in one by one to the door to listen to them talk. And while we listened to them talking, it was like listening to a song in a dream, so that even when our egos reared our heads and we felt like we had something to say, we didn’t. We didn’t speak. We sat and listened, devoutly, afraid that if we revealed ourselves we would wake up suddenly in our beds under leaky roofs with cockroaches scampering on the floor and people crawling out on the streets, bleeding outside on the asphalt and being shot at for no discernible reason, no reason at all, dying every day for no reason when there was so much work to be done and nobody was willing to do it.”