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.
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:
“ Ebiere! The little one who ran away to the white man’s school!” “I didn’t run away, Mama,” Ebiere said, her voice breaking. “I just… left.” Evi Edna Ogholi - No Place Like Home
She left the blazer behind. She wore a simple kampala dress and rubber slippers. The flight to Port Harcourt was short, but the road to the village—Kporghor—was a battle. The asphalt ended three hours in. Then came the red mud. The driver, a young man named Tamuno, kept glancing at her in the rearview mirror.
She looked out at the children playing in the red mud. They were laughing. Their feet were dirty. Their bellies were full. She stood on the balcony of her 14th-floor
One year later, Evi Edna Ogholi’s song played on a crackling radio in Kporghor village. The cassette was ancient, the lyrics scratched, but the message was clear:
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. She had a video call with the London office in ten minutes
On the eighth day, her phone—charged by a solar panel—finally pinged. Seventeen emails. Three missed calls from London. Her boss’s message read: “We’re offering you the promotion. Head of West African Operations. You’d move to Geneva.”
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.
“Ma, you sure about this place? No network there. No light since 1998.” “I know,” she said. “Drive.”
“No matter where you roam, no matter how far you go… there’s no place like home.”