Nwoke ọma

That all missing persons be found and returned to their loved ones.

4:44.

My parents never locked the door on weekends. Not a metaphor. Literally. The front door of our flat in Surulere stayed open from 8am Saturday until everyone had gone home Sunday night. My mother said a locked door in daytime was a declaration of hostility and she refused to make that declaration. My father agreed with everything my mother said about hospitality. He had married her knowing exactly what he was signing up for. By the time I was 12 our house had a rotation of children that had nothing to do with blood. Emeka from next door whose parents worked double shifts and left him with a key and instructions he followed loosely. Shade who lived 3 streets away and came for homework help and never quite stopped coming. Tunde whose father traveled for work so often that my father started including him in school fees conversations the same way he included us. My mother cooked like she was always expecting more than were invited. There was always a pot that could stretch. Always space at the table that could shift to fit one more. She'd see Emeka at the gate and say go wash your hands without stopping her conversation. Never an invitation. An assumption. The only question was whether you'd washed. My father was quieter about it. He showed it differently. Saturday mornings he'd drive to the market and always came back with more than the list required. Extra tomatoes. More meat than a family of 4 needed. We never asked. He'd unpack everything and my mother would look at it and nod and start planning a pot that fit the day. He fixed things. Not just ours. Shade's mother's ceiling fan twice. Emeka's bicycle chain more times than anyone counted. Tunde's school shoes when the sole separated and Tunde's father was in Abuja unreachable by anything except prayer. All of it without ceremony. Without making anyone feel the weight of being helped. That was the specific thing about my father. He helped people in a way that didn't bend them. My mother's love was louder but only slightly. She knew everyone's story. Not because she asked. Because she listened completely, like whatever you said was the most important thing in any room. She remembered birthdays nobody knew she knew. Called Emeka's mother sometimes just to say the boy is fine, he ate, don't worry. Argued with Shade's auntie once over something that was none of her business and had decided was. She made everybody's problem her problem. My father made everybody's problem his project. Together they built something none of us had a word for until we were old enough to miss it badly. We are all in our 30s now. Emeka is in Canada. Shade is in Abuja. Tunde stayed in Lagos and became the kind of friend who shows up when you call without asking why. We still talk in a WhatsApp group named after our old street. Last year my mother fell sick. Nothing too serious. But she was in hospital for 4 days and visiting hours had a limit and the waiting room still somehow always had more than just family in it. Emeka sent money from Canada before I could ask. Shade drove from Abuja the second day. Tunde sat in that waiting room the entire first night and didn't tell anyone until after. I watched all of this and thought about the open door and the stretched pots and the fixed shoes and the remembered birthdays. They never told us to love each other. They just loved so openly and so consistently that we learned the shape of it by watching. By living inside it. By growing up in a house where the door didn't lock and the food stretched and nobody who needed to belong was ever turned away. We became a family because they showed us what family looked like when it chose to be bigger than itself. I am still learning how to do it the way they did. I don't think I'll ever fully manage it. But I leave my door open on weekends. It's the closest I know how to get.

My grandmother once told me, “Not speaking badly about anyone is the best way to speak well of yourself.”

Unless it is specifically necessary that you demonstrate skill Always opt to be underestimated

Go forth and have your best day yet.

My parish has a free library and workspace ☺️

11:11.

my brother, i know there are moments in life when all you want is to sit with a woman like this and open up about your deepest pain and your secrets. i know you crave that real, honest conversation to tell your story. but don’t… just reach for a drink and try to drown it all instead.

My Ghanaian colleague walked into the office Monday morning, chest out, wearing a Black Stars jersey like he'd personally won something. Chin up. Shoulders back. The walk of a man who had rehearsed this entrance in his bathroom mirror. His name was Kwame. We had an understanding. He pretended jollof wasn't a competition. I pretended to believe him. It worked because we were both lying and we both knew it and neither of us was willing to be the first to blink. It started properly in 2022. World Cup group stage. Ghana vs Uruguay. I bought him a meat pie from the canteen that morning as a gesture of goodwill. Pure diplomacy. He accepted it with both hands, took one bite, nodded slowly like he was considering peace terms, then told me Nigerian jollof tasted like party rice made by someone who showed up to the wrong party anyway. I looked at him for a long time. Then I said nothing. I let it go. I filed it. I archived it somewhere quiet in my chest and went back to my desk like a mature adult. He scored a goal that evening. Not Ghana. Kwame personally. He walked past my desk the next morning and hummed. Just hummed. No words. The most aggressive thing a man can do to another man is hum at him after a football result. I was collecting receipts. Then 2023 AFCON came. Super Eagles. Brilliant run. Final. We lost to Ivory Coast and I won't talk about that because this story isn't about my healing journey. Kwame sent me a WhatsApp message at 11pm that night. A photo of Ghanaian jollof. No caption. Just the rice. Sitting there looking smug. I screenshot it and saved it under a folder I labelled "Reasons." Last month everything changed. Some food blogger with 200k followers ranked West African jollof. Ghanaian jollof came first. Nigerian jollof came third. Behind Senegal. I didn't even know Senegal was in the conversation. Kwame printed it out. Printed it. On paper. Walked to my desk, placed it in front of me like a court document, and returned to his seat without making eye contact. I sat with that paper for three days. On the fourth day I forwarded him the FIFA rankings without comment. He replied with a photo of Asamoah Gyan's penalty against Uruguay in 2010. The miss. He captioned it "still healing." I replied with Nigeria's World Cup appearances vs Ghana's. He sent back a voice note. Just him eating rice. Chewing sounds. Three minutes and forty seconds of deliberate chewing directly into the microphone. This man was raised to wound people. I walked to his desk. Pulled a chair. Sat down. We looked at each other the way two nations look across a negotiating table when both sides are tired but neither is willing to say it first. He broke first. Almost. He said fine. If someone put a gun to his head. Nigerian jollof could be considered edible. I said Ghana plays beautiful football and Abedi Pele was genuinely one of the greatest Africans to ever touch a ball. We shook hands. Two pumps. Like diplomats finalizing a ceasefire everyone knows is temporary. He poured me sobolo from his flask. I gave him the last chin chin from my drawer. We sat eating each other's things pretending this wasn't the most intimate cultural exchange either of us had experienced all year. Then he said at least our waakye wakes up every morning and chooses to be great. I told him Indomie was invented to fill the gaps Ghanaian cuisine left in the human soul. He laughed so hard he knocked his sobolo over. I didn't help him clean it up. This friendship has no finish line. Just two men from countries sharing a border and an argument running since before either of us was born. The rice war never ends. It just takes breaks for jollof.

I won't forget one 4year old kid I met at the ER Was about to set a line for him and told him it wasn't gonna be painful to calm him down So he calmed down and I pricked him only to hear him start crying and say to me "Liar, Shame on you" 😭😭😭😭😭😭

You will grow older and learn how to use the word “friend” correctly.

@TheIgboWolf Ehen nau. First to do no dey pain. 😆

This is not the one we share food

“Don’t post my lovely wife on social media, if you do that, just know you have overstepped.”😂♥️ -Moment 93-year-old playfully warned his son not to post his wife on social media

Teacher: "Name 4 cities in Europe" Me : "Madeira, Manchester, Madrid, Turin & Manchester again"

It's my mum's birthday and my dads Whatsapp status caption is EVERYTHING….

@johndebosco 🙏🏾

@ChiefLyffBoxx It's part of the job, I'm used to it already 😂 Thank you

A special appreciation to all the choristers, lay readers, Mass servers and altar girls for their various contributions to the church, before, during and after the lenten season.

@johndebosco Sorry 😆

@ChiefLyffBoxx Thank you sir......that's how our parish priest too forget us as he was thanking everybody during the vigil Mass.

11:11.