They say a hen that hatches ducklingsmust learn to watch them from the bank.My country hatched us. My country watched.Nobody has written down what it cost her. Japa. The word is Yoruba. To run.To bolt. To be gone before the door swings back.It used to be a word for a thief in a market.Now it is a word for a graduating class. Count what she spent on us. Count it honestly. Mothers who sold what they had to sell,and then sold the thing they had said they would never sell.Fathers on night buses with the fare and nothing after.Teachers who came through the flood and the strikeand taught anyway, in a room with no fan,forty children to a room, and taught anyway. We did our homework by candle and kerosenebecause NEPA took the light,as NEPA always took the light,a whole country bent over its books by flame,and in the yards the generators coughing,and the small cheap ones, the ones a family saves for,carrying the name the market gave them.I better pass my neighbour.Go and find me a truer sentenceabout what we were doing to each otherwhile the state did nothing to either of us. Then WAEC. Then JAMB. Then the waiting.And when the lecturers struck, as they struck,a year would go missing out of a young life,and no one was compensated for the year,and the year did not come back. And still she raised doctors out of that.Engineers. Nurses. Pharmacists. Physicists.Out of the candle and the flood and the missing year,she raised them anyway,which is the part the world never puts in the report. Then, before first light, the queue outside the embassy.Grown men with their folders held against the chestlike something that might try to escape.Nurses who have delivered a hundred childrenstanding in the cold to be askedwhether they intend to return.A country's best, in a line, on the pavement,outside a building that is not in their country,waiting for a stranger behind glassto decide the rest of their lives before lunch. And then Murtala Muhammed, the departure hall,where every family in Nigeria has knelt.Mothers at the barrier praying over sonswith both hands raised and the whole terminal watching.Go. Go and do well. Do not look back.The blessing and the wound arriving in one breath,because she is asking him to leave her,and she means it,and she will cry in the car park after,and she will not tell him. Now count what arrived on the other side. Wards in England running through the nighton Nigerian hands.Some grandmother in Leeds at three in the morningbeing told in a Lagos accent that she will be fine,and believing it, and being right.Laboratories in America. Rigs in the Gulf.Papers in journals with our names on themand somebody else's city underneath.My own brother drew the chambers of the heartas a boy in a compound with no light.He mends them now in a countrythat did not pay for a single one of his lessons. And now count what stayed behind. A ward in a town with a name you do not know.In the ward, a woman.In the woman, a thing that could have been caught early.No doctor. Not because none was trained.Because the one who was trained is in Manchester,and the one after him is in Toronto,and the one after that is studying for the examthat will take him to Riyadh in the spring. She was not killed by anybody.That is the whole difficulty.There is no man to name.Only a long arithmetic performed on herby people who never met herand did not intend her any harm. And do not make saints of us who went.And do not make fools of the ones who stayed. They are holding the roof up.Teaching in the room with no fan.Running a clinic on a generator and a promise.Building the thing anyway, in the country, with the country,while the rest of us send moneyand call it presence. Put me in the ledger too. I belong in it.Fifteen years old at the barrier with my mother,and everything since then paid forby a place that will not see the interest.I count rooms now, in other people's countries,looking for a face like mine and rarely finding one,and it has never once occurred to methat I am also the reasona room somewhere behind me is empty. I am the harvest of a farm I do not farm. Somewhere tonight the light will come backto a compound in Lagos,and the old shout will go up, up NEPA,the way it has gone up in that yard for fifty years. Listen to how thin it is now. Half the voices that used to make that noiseare making other noises in other countries,in other accents, at other hours,into telephones held against the ear of a womanwho says she is fine, she is managing,the light is on today, thank God,come home when you can. We are coming home.We have been coming home for twenty years. — tachi