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Patrick said, warmly shaking Chinedu’s hand.
    The church was dim, full of echoes and mysteries and the faint scent of candles. They sat side by side in the middle row, next to a woman holding a baby.
    ‘Did you like him?’ Ukamaka whispered.
    ‘The priest? He seemed OK.’
    ‘I mean like like.’
    ‘Oh, Jehovah God! Of course not.’
    She had made him smile. ‘You are not going to be deported, Chinedu. We will find a way. We will.’ She squeezed his hand and knew he was amused by her stressing of the ‘we’.
    He leaned close. ‘You know, I had a crush on Thomas Sankara, too.’
    ‘No!’
    ‘I didn’t even know that there was a country called Burkina Faso in West Africa until my teacher in secondary school talked about him and brought in a picture. I will never forget how crazy in love I fell with a newspaper photograph.’
    At first they stifled their laughter and then they let it out, joyously leaning against each other, while next to them, the woman holding the baby watched.
    The choir had begun to sing. It was one of those Sundays when the priest blessed the congregation with holy water at the beginning of Mass, and Father Patrick was walking up and down, flicking water on the people with something that looked like a big saltshaker. Ukamaka watched him and thought how much more subdued Catholic Masses were in America; how in Nigeria it would have been a vibrant green branch from a mango tree that the priest would dip in a bucket of holy water held by a hurrying, sweating Mass-server; how he would have stridden up and down, splashing and swirling, holy water raining down; how the people would have been drenched; and how, smiling and making the sign of the cross, they would have felt blessed.

The Banana Eater
    Monica Arac de Nyeko
    Naalu and her family lived a block from us, at number G.16 in the housing estates. Many things about our houses were similar. Their size: a kitchen and store, a sitting room and a bedroom. The paint: cream and magenta against a brown tiled roof. Only our back yards were different. Theirs was almost bare – grassless and without any bougainvillea, thorn brush, or red euphorbia fencing to keep trespassers or vagabonds away. Ours was lush with paspalum grass. We had flowers, too. In the rain season, dahlias and hibiscus bloomed; so did roses and sophronitella, cosmos and bleeding heart vines. Everyone who passed by our house said the garden gave a fine display of colour and fragrance.
    Ma’s gardening knowledge had been transplanted from her school years at Our Lady of Good Counsel, the Catholic girls’ school. Home economics was compulsory then. Ma never did like the cooking and baking bits. But she did like gardening. A house, she often said, starts at the back yard. See the state of the back yard and you’ll know if you want to enter.
    Gardening might have seemed viable in Catholic boarding school, but in the real world things were different. In the estates, only potato fields and cassava survived to maturity. They were unspectacular. The silly boys were not interested in them; nor were the children who liked to roam about the houses breaking windows or anything that looked fragile. Plant fences and flowers, on the other hand, were different. They were boastful. They attracted everyone. And oftentimes people did stop to examine the garden arrangement or to pick flowers to stick in their hair. These people were generally not trouble­some. Ma tolerated them. The lot she found unbearable, though, were the market vendors.
    Every day as soon as customers turned scarce, the vendors left the market. They crossed Estate Close, the road that separated the market from the estates, and came to sit in our back yard. They were choosy, those vendors. They avoided all the other back yards on the block. They came straight for ours, and laid down their tired and sweaty bottoms. Our back yard was a place to forget about the market and its unsold sacks of potatoes and bananas, a place to gossip,