–narratives as catharsis–
You ever heard that joke of the Nigerian father who paid for his kid’s swimming lessons? Anyway, it goes: the father saw the child drowning during their first swimming class and yelled; “Ayomide! Rise! Don’t waste my money!” That joke used to crack me up probably more than it should. Last week, during my…
It was about 1am in Paracas and I was having beers and sharing laughs with fellow travellers. A couple of them were Australian, one was from Panama and the last was Peruvian. The Peruvian told us about a drug people (mostly of Caucasian descent) travelled to Peru for. It was supposed to be some kind…
It has taken me way too long to put this blog post together mainly because it is about Peru and Peru has my heart. I was newly nineteen and almost done with my first year in college when I panicked. Literally, panicked. I did not want to go back home to my suburbs only to…
‘Maame without borders’ is supposedly a representation of my ‘coming of age’ story; me expressing myself without any boundaries or prescribed notions of who I must be in certain spaces. A piece of my story is my struggle to control my fernweh. Fernweh is technically the German word for wanderlust, but, think about it as being…
I swear I’m a cynic. But I’m also a romantic. I love ‘love’ and everything about it but I’m always ready for the shoe to drop (is that the correct expression?). The greatest love story I’ve ever known was that of my aunt and uncle. My uncle spent two (or three years) polishing shoes around…
Some time ago, one of my colleagues passed a slick comment about my somewhat constant need to find myself in a new space. He asked me what I was constantly running away from and I laughed. I mean, what else was I supposed to do? I wasn’t running away from anyone or anything in particular—I…
