Somebody's Heart Is Burning by Tanya Shaffer Read Free Book Online Page A

everything blurs together. Kweku lunged toward us with the torch, and then Gorbachev was holding my hand and the three of us were running blind along the beach. At some point we turned uphill, staggering toward the porch light of the hostel, which glimmered feebly on the horizon. Hannah, on Gorbachev’s other side, screamed a string of Fanti words into the wind as we ran, stumbling and gasping, toward the light.

    The next morning, Hannah was gone. At my panicked insistence, Mr. Awitor made inquiries and learned that she had called her parents in Amsterdam, who had arranged for a ticket home the same day. By the time I awoke, she was already at the airport. I don’t know whether she got up at dawn and went to the beach to salvage her possessions. Some volunteers went down there to search, but they found nothing. She would at least have needed her money and passport, I pointed out, but Gorbachev said that Hannah always carried those things with her, in a money belt worn under her dress, “like a foreigner.”
    For me she left no note, nothing. And I never found out whether she’d said goodbye to her beloved Essi. I didn’t go back to The Last Stop for many months. When I finally did, Essi chattered cheerfully, avoiding my eyes, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask.
    “She loved Ghana so much,” said Gorbachev sorrowfully. “And this horrible man, he must drive everything to ruin.”
    “But why would she just leave like that?” I asked for the hundredth time. “She could have found another place to live. And she could have visited Essi when Kweku was away.”
    “Sistah Korkor,” said Gorbachev, looking at me sadly. “Our Sistah Abena, you know, she was a very kind girl, but she was not strong like you. It is very good fortune that she was born in this world to parents who were able to send for her.”

    Later, when I was back in the States, I got a letter from Hannah. The tone was exuberant, filled with exclamation points. It sounded more like the girl I’d first seen on the hostel steps than the woman run off the beach by a friend’s irate husband. She was now in nursing school, she said. One day, she’d gone for a long walk in a part of Amsterdam that was unfamiliar to her and stumbled onto a Ghanaian restaurant. She went inside and was amazed to find all her favorite foods:
fufu
and pepper sauce,
kenke
, garden egg stew, groundnut soup, even
apeteshi
to drink. Imagine the waiters’ surprise and delight when she began speaking to them in Fanti! Soon she was going there every day. They invited her to parties, and she discovered a whole community— a little Ghana in Amsterdam. For the first time in her life, she felt almost at home in her hometown. And that feeling reminded her of what she’d nearly forgotten: how right it all was before it all went wrong.
    “Oh, Sistah Korkor!” she wrote, and I could hear her voice as clearly as if she were standing before me, flushed and tremulous and filled with hope.
    “I remember now how very sweet Ghana was! How tender the air, the nighttime smell of ocean. Also Essi, her laughter too loud at my ear. Now I know what I must do, and school is no longer boring! I want to study and learn, so I can take my degree quickly and soon, so soon, I can leave this place forever and go home.”

4
    Yao
    Love, baskets of love for the baby Yao. Gardens of it. Oceans. In a village swarming with children, each of them vital and mercurial enough to
remind your heart that it can split wide open, Yao has made an impression on us all. Each day, men and women, African and foreign volunteers alike, set down our shovels for a moment, wipe the dust and sweat
from our eyes, and watch Minessi as she strolls by, tall, dark, and regal,
with Yao strapped to her back. Yao swivels his little head, working hard
to take us all in with his enormous dark eyes. And what eyes! Compassionate enough to forgive a world’s transgressions, alert enough to
awaken a planet asleep.
    Forgive my gushing. I’m in