She remembered why she left. She was nine. Her father, a fisherman, had died because the creek he fished in was coated in crude oil. An oil company’s pipeline had burst. They paid the village a pittance. Her mother sold her gold earrings to pay for the bus to the city. “Don’t look back,” her mother had said at the bus park. “Make a life where the water is clean.”
She looked out at the children playing in the red mud. They were laughing. Their feet were dirty. Their bellies were full.
An old woman emerged from a hut. Mama Patience. She had been the village midwife. She squinted, then her toothless mouth opened in a gasp. Evi Edna Ogholi - No Place Like Home
“I never forgot,” she said. “I just buried it under marble floors.”
“Yes,” she said. “But the elevator was broken. And the view was lonely.” She remembered why she left
But Ebiere wasn't thinking about spreadsheets. She was thinking about the photograph in her hand. It was creased at the edges, faded into sepia. A girl of about nine, wearing a yellow plastic bangle and a torn dress, stood in front of a thatched hut. Behind her, an oil rig burned in the distance—a flaring tower of eternal fire against a mangrove swamp.
“No matter where you roam, no matter how far you go… there’s no place like home.” An oil company’s pipeline had burst
Ebiere listened as she stirred a pot of pepper soup. She was no longer an analyst. She was a teacher now. The school had reopened. She had written to a small NGO, and they had sent books. The oil pipeline had been shut down—not because of the company’s kindness, but because a woman with a hoe and a story had refused to be silent.