Sweet Sweet Strawberry Taste

AGNI, 89

1.

At an abandoned building’s fence, we sat on old ashes and traded banter. We gathered supplies on torn glossy pages between our splayed legs. The pages were brochures from American colleges mailed free of charge upon request. The brochures showed students smiling and holding folders close to their chests or sitting with legs crossed on stone benches, lecture halls with semicircular tiers, beautiful young ladies playing handball on well-manicured turf.

The young ones amongst us wanted to be in those lecture halls overseas. What tongue-wagging, envy-provoking recompense could be greater than getting into an American college when you could hardly make it through secondary school in Kano? We gathered around the brochures with astonished eyes and took rounds sniffing at their glossy pages. We loved the perfumed smell. One of us asked if the air in America smelled like the brochures, as though he was tired of breathing the air here.

We had our doubts about studying in America. First, there was the school certificate exam which we had to pass, and then there was the SAT. What about the money? We could get scholarships if we made high SAT scores, but then we would have to worry about money to register for the exam. Not to mention the ever-elusive American visa if the admission worked out.

“The interviewers always frown their faces and never look at you in the eye. My uncle did a visa interview and came back empty-handed despite days of fasting and prayers for divine intervention,” one of us said.

Our doubts grew bigger, and our dreams of a foreign education became like the ashes we sat on….