She stayed for seven days. She helped Mama Patience mend the church roof. She taught the children how to read using a torn newspaper she found in her bag. She drank palm wine from a calabash. She slept on the floor.
But Ebiere had listened too well. She had built a life where the water was clean, but her soul was dry. She had replaced the sound of village drums with the sound of Slack notifications. She had replaced the taste of fresh bush mango with the taste of anxiety. Evi Edna Ogholi - No Place Like Home
The air in Lagos tasted of rust and gasoline. Ebiere knew this because she had just licked her cracked lips after a dusty okada ride from Ojuelegba. At thirty-four, she was a senior analyst for a multinational oil firm—a woman in a blazer who spoke with a clipped British accent she’d acquired at a boarding school in Surrey. She stayed for seven days
She turned up the radio. Evi Edna’s voice filled the evening air. And for the first time in her life, Ebiere understood the song not as a lyric, but as a truth: She drank palm wine from a calabash
She stood on the balcony of her 14th-floor apartment in Victoria Island. Below, the city roared: generators hummed, street hawkers sang praises to their goods, and a thousand Danfo buses coughed black smoke into the sky. It was a Tuesday. She had a video call with the London office in ten minutes.
Mama Patience hugged her. The old woman smelled of shea butter and firewood. “Same thing,” she whispered. “The road that takes you away is the same road that brings you back. There is no other road.”