“....The governor is coming tomorrow, and we have prepared another dance for him. He will get on the news again to announce all the things that he had donated to the camp. The foreign aid team will come with their own supplies too. They will come with trucks full of goods and they will come to talk to us. They will take pictures with us - and with all the things that have been donated to the camp. The newspapers will show our pictures smiling like we have been instructed to do by the camp officers when the pictures were taken. But then the store is always empty. The foods, the water, the drugs and even the mosquito nets disappear immediately their pictures have been taken. None of those things have legs! How did they walk away? The answer is simple. They took them!”
Embers is a drama of metaphor, and perhaps the dialogue captioned above best illustrates the dilemma in that metaphor.