Somebody's Heart Is Burning by Tanya Shaffer

four or five other women, each of you straining in silent (or not so silent) solidarity, is a great equalizer, a uniquely humbling experience. Imagine employer and employee perched side by side every morning before work, I mused. Wouldn’t that go a distance toward breaking down hierarchy? Or world leaders, before they go into a conference room to decide their country’s fates. Every president and prime minister, I decided, should have to try this at least once.
    On my second morning in Apam, after returning from these rather chastening ablutions, Santana and I stood on the sagging upper porch of her family’s home, talking. Stacks of tires, piles of wood, and crumbling cement blocks were strewn about the yard below. The scene was a kaleidoscope of motion: children chasing a ball, goats chasing the children, women stirring pots of steaming mush. Two men played cards while others stood around in a circle, drinking and offering advice. Groups shifted and reshuffled as people came and went, walking or pedaling their wide-wheeled bicycles, balancing things on their heads. At the far end of the yard, the words “Cry Your Own Cry” were painted in bright blue letters on a boarded-up shack. Beyond the yard, corrugated tin roofs stretched a few hundred yards to the cape, where the shaggy-headed palm trees leaned toward the sea.
    As Santana and I talked, smells of smoking fish and roasting corn wafted up, while shouts, cries, laughter, and the staticky pulse of a radio mingled in our ears. A big-bellied, thin-limbed child in underwear sauntered barefoot across the yard, eating from a can. She looked up at us and shouted
“obroni”
fifteen or twenty times, until I waved to her and called out “Hello!” Satisfied, she continued her stroll.
    “Sistah Korkor,” Santana was tapping my arm. “Did you hear what I said? I said I have not been happy for some six months.”
    “What? Why?”
    “My man, he has left. He has gone to Italy ten months ago. Then, some six months ago, he has sent a cassette to his parents, and he has told them that I should find a husband. He calls Ghana women a natural resource. Himself, he will find a more costly woman. A Europe woman. Because I have not traveled, I am worth nothing. A natural resource only, like water, everywhere, cheap. Because I have stayed in Ghana here.”
    “What a jerk!” I said.
    “Eight years I was with him. Now I am twenty-seven years old. You see? He has wasted my years. I should have traveled before him. I should have been in Europe long time now.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I have given him the money to go. Then, some months later, I should have followed him. My father, he had seven fishing boats. Now he has died and my stepbrothers have lost five of them with drinking. But before, I managed the affairs. I saved. I gathered 600,000 cedis, and my brother was bringing this money to Accra to arrange the visa and the plane tickets, when he was in an accident with the
tro-tro
and died. When we went to claim the body, the money was not there. Now my brother has left me with five children to provide. So I have lost my chance. I have lost my chance and my man, too.”
    I looked at her in surprise, searching for something to say. I’d never imagined such a story, never sensed her underlying despair. “You’ll meet someone better,” I said, taking her hand. “Someone who values you.”
    She shrugged. “I don’t want them now, these men. I see what they are. Two have betrayed me. Now the other, from before, he begs me to come back. But he has betrayed me last time, with a woman. All his friends say, ‘Santana, come back to him,’ because I used to cook for them, long time. They all love me; they remember. But I say no, he has betrayed me once, he will do it again.”
    I nodded sympathetically.
    “What about your man?” she asked suddenly. “Your sweet Michael.”
    “What about him?”
    “Why have you left him?”
    “I . . . I wanted to travel . . .”
    “You will