Peter greeted me in the mostly empty gravel parking lot of a Mennonite church on the outskirts of Seminole, a small city in West Texas surrounded by cotton and peanut fields. The brick building was tucked in a cobbled-together neighborhood of scrapyards, metal barns, and modest homes with long dirt driveways. No sign out front advertised its name; no message board displayed a Bible verse. No cross, no steeple—nothing, in fact, that would let a passerby know they had stumbled on a place of worship. When my car pulled up, Peter emerged to find out who I was.
He hadn’t been expecting a stranger with a notepad, but he listened as I explained that I had come to town to write about the measles outbreak, which had by that point sent 20 people from the area to the hospital and caused the death of an unnamed child, the disease’s first victim in the United States in a decade.