Evi Edna Ogholi - No Place Like Home -

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.”

The Echo of Red Earth

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.”

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: 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 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.

Ebiere wept. Not sad tears. Tears of recognition. This boy had nothing, yet he had the one thing she had lost: the belief that home is not a place of comfort, but a place of belonging. Even broken. Especially broken. She remembered why she left

Home is not where you are from. Home is where you are allowed to be poor in money but rich in breath. Home is where the fire burns not to destroy, but to cook your dinner. Home is the red earth beneath your feet when you finally stop running.

And there is truly no place like it.

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. An oil company’s pipeline had burst

“Auntie Ebiere!” one of them shouted. “Is it true you used to live in a glass house in the sky?”

Her boss called immediately. “Are you insane? Geneva! A penthouse! A car!” “I have a roof,” she said quietly. “And I have red earth under my feet. That’s better.”

She hung up. Mama Patience handed her a hoe. “The yams need planting,” the old woman said. “You think you can remember how?”

The London call went fine. But after hanging up, she looked around her “home.” White leather couch. Italian marble floors. A fridge that dispenses ice cubes shaped like diamonds. It was beautiful. It was also a gilded cage.