Ice cream, winter, and forever

Mary was a pharmacist in Juba, beloved by her patients and sworn off dating after a string of disappointments. Ryan, a Canadian engineer from Toronto on volunteer assignment in South Sudan, came into her pharmacy for medicine and walked out with an excuse to return the next day, and the day after.

Their first date was humble — ice cream at a small place in the city, two stools, and a conversation about everything except what they both clearly wanted to talk about. By the second date, at a garden restaurant, Ryan admitted he had been planning his return trips to the pharmacy for weeks.

He extended his posting to stay near her. Then he extended his country. He took her to fine dining at the Pyramid, drove her to river spots she had never visited, and learned to cook South Sudanese food from her mother, who adored him on sight.

He proposed outside the pharmacy, in the rain, kneeling in a way that made the whole street stop. Then he proposed again on their first trip to Canada, under the winter sky, because, he said, the first one had been in South Sudan and he wanted her to know he meant it everywhere.

"People thought I was crazy to trust a man from so far away," Mary says. "But Ryan was not running from something. He was running toward me. And now my life is divided between my pharmacy in Juba and a home in Toronto, with a man who takes care of both halves of my heart."