Igwe apara
@aparaigwe1991
29 days ago
August 2019. JFK airport. I had been on planes for 36 hours. My whole life in two suitcases and a backpack.
My name is Amara. I am from Limpopo, South Africa. A small village called Ga-Masemola, where my grandmother still keeps goats and the sun sets like a bruise over the red earth.
I came to New Jersey for a nursing scholarship. I was 22. I had never seen snow.
The first week, I stayed with my aunt's cousin's daughter, Zanele. She had been in the U.S. for ten years. She looked at my clothes and laughed. "You came like this?" She said it in Sepedi, our language. Then she turned to her husband, an American man who didn't understand us. "She's so village."
I smiled anyway. I didn't know yet.
Zanele charged me $400 for a mattress on the floor in her basement. She said it was a favor. "In America, nothing is free, sisi."
I found a job at a diner in Newark three weeks later. The cook, Mr. Gonzalez, saw my hands shaking during my first shift. He made me sit down, brought me coffee, said "You got this, mija." I didn't know Spanish but I knew kindness.
My first real winter hit in December. I had no boots. My feet were wet for three days straight. A white woman, Mrs. Patterson, a regular customer who always ordered eggs over easy, left a pair of boots at the diner for me. Wrapped in newspaper with a note: "These are too small for my daughter. Stay warm."
I cried in the bathroom for twenty minutes.
The worst was the church. A Nigerian pastor in Irvington heard about me. He invited me to a "sisterhood gathering." I walked forty minutes in the rain. They made me stand at the front. "This girl just came from Africa. Let's pray for her." They laid hands on me. Someone whispered, "She doesn't even know how to dress." They didn't feed me. They took a collection for "mission work back home."
I walked back in the rain. Forty minutes. No one offered a ride.
The turning point was March 2020. COVID hit. The diner closed. I had $47 left. No family here. No church. No Zanele. I called every African number I had. Voicemail. Voicemail. "The person you are trying to reach is not available."
I sat on that mattress on the floor and I thought about my grandmother. She told me before I left: "Ban aba ba go tlo hloka maoto, wena o tsamaya ka pelo" - These people will have no feet, but you will walk with your heart.
That night, I went to the corner store to buy rice. Mr. Patel, the owner, saw my face. He didn't ask. He handed me a bag of groceries. Eggs. Beans. Bread. A small jar of peanut butter. "You pay when you can."
He was not my people. He was a stranger. He saved my life.
I started walking to the diner every day even though it was closed. Just to stand there. Mr. Gonzalez saw me through the window. He came out, gave me two hundred dollars cash. "From the tips jar. We split it. You worked."
Something cracked inside me that day. I stopped waiting for my own people to see me.
I moved out of Zanele's basement in April. A room in Elizabeth shared with a nurse from Ghana, a woman named Efua who never laughed at my accent. She taught me how to drive. She called me her "little sister" without irony.
Now it's 2024. I am a registered nurse at University Hospital in Newark. I own a car. I buy boots for women I see struggling in winter. I send money to my grandmother every month.
My own people in America never did for me what strangers did. I used to be angry about that. Now I just know that blood does not mean water that is safe to drink.
I am not healed completely. But I am not thirsty for them anymore.
#railwayafrica #travellimpopo #booksonnircle #musicandpoetry #worldpoem #blackartwork #NircleStories #wordart #Notes #RealTalk #MyStory #strangerkindness #bloomfromwinter
14 days ago
