Getting to Know Me

Meghan sat on the front step of her house, lost in thought. In the West, the African sun blazed brightly one last time before sinking gradually below the horizon. A mosquito whined around her face before settling on her left ear, but she swept it off absent-mindedly. Her blue eyes lazily took in the mud-bricked houses with their dull metal roofs, loaded clotheslines strung between the houses, mothers calling their children inside in shrill and admonishing tones. She smiled as the last little girl scuttled inside, but soon followed suit and retreated into her own house.

Candlelight flickered on the neatly whitewashed walls and simple, functional style of the room. A small cot covered in a locally-woven blanket stood in the corner, and a blue-shuttered window above that opened out into the lush emerald dusk. A single bare bulb was positioned above the table she ate at, but beeswax candles still stood at various places around the room to provide more light. Next to her bed, a rickety bookshelf sagged under the weight of several well-worn books and notebooks and a shabby shoe box.

It was the latter that she pulled out before sinking onto her bed, one leg curled underneath her. She gingerly lifted the lid from the box. Inside lay stacks of paper – letters, to be specific. She picked one off the top and began to read:

Dear Meghan,

Hope you are doing well. We celebrated my fifty-eighth birthday last weekend; Grandma and Pap came over for dinner, but otherwise the day was uneventful.

Your father insisted that I enclose today’s newspaper, even though by the time you receive this it will be obsolete—

—here, Meghan glanced at the date on the paper, and sure enough, it was three months old. She turned back to the letter, but she had almost come to the end.

Everyone over here and in Ireland sends their love and hopes you’ll be back soon, at least to visit. Take care of yourself out there.

Love, Mama

Meghan sighed and let her hand flop into her lap. This letter had been her latest news from home, but it was already three months old. When she had first come to Ghana to teach, she had received a tearful, three-page epistle from her mother every month, but now she was lucky to get five hastily-written notes a year.

She scanned the letter again. At the closing of every single one, her mother beseeched her to come back to the United States “at least to visit”, but the longer Meghan stayed here, the more unlikely it seemed that she would want to go back to living in the United States, if and when she did leave. She had made friends here in this small beach community, she was learning the language, slowly but surely; but most importantly, she enjoyed teaching little girls in Ghana because she knew she was making a difference, and it was a feeling she felt most acutely here in Africa.

She couldn’t remember what had first influenced her to want to work in Africa, initially as a doctor, then as a teacher, but she had for as long as she could remember. Historical figures such as Gandhi and a young Che Guevara fueled her passion for humanitarian causes and the betterment of society as a whole from an early age, and the fire hadn’t died yet.

She was brought out of her contemplations by the candle next to her guttering and going out, leaving that side of the room in partial darkness. Sighing, she returned the letter box to its position on the shelf before snuggling into bed and flicking the light switch off.

Her eyes not used to the shadows yet, she listened to cicadas chirping and the leaves rustling gently outside her window. Out of the darkness, an ember in the candle wick still pulsated red, but a breeze carried the sharp smell of smoke past where Meghan drifted in a boundless dream and out into the African night.