Evi Edna Ogholi - No Place Like Home Apr 2026

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.

A young boy was fishing nearby. Not with a net—with a plastic bottle tied to a string. “Any fish?” she asked. He shook his head. “But I catch hope,” he said, smiling. “Tomorrow, maybe.”

“I never forgot,” she said. “I just buried it under marble floors.”

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

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

She typed back: “I resign.”

As the city faded, the oil pipes appeared. They ran alongside the road like black pythons, oozing rust and crude. Then the flares. Even in daylight, they stained the sky orange. This was the Niger Delta. Her home. A place the world had come to for oil, but left behind in poison.

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.

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.” But Ebiere had listened too well

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.”

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.

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. She had replaced the taste of fresh bush

When the car finally stopped, the village looked smaller than she remembered. The church roof had collapsed. The primary school was a skeleton of concrete. But the red earth—that was the same. And the smell. Not the perfume of Lagos, but the raw smell of rain-soaked clay, palm wine, and smoke.