-Oluyemisi Oladejo

SUBJECT: Feedback on Your PPT for Urbanization and Development Conference

Dear Vanessa,

I hope this email finds you well.

I have reviewed your slides for the Urbanization and Development Conference presentation, and I wanted to offer a few suggestions.

The slides appear a bit congested. Instead of reproducing all the information in our original paper, you should highlight only the key points. This will make the slides easy for your audience to follow. 

Consider enhancing the visual appeal by adding images. Particularly, I think adding a chart to slide 2 will effectively illustrate the statistics you are presenting about the current and projected urban population in 2040. 

Also, the pale blue color of the texts blends too much with the background. Please, use contrasting colors of texts and background to improve readability.

Finally, as this is your first conference presentation, it is natural to feel nervous. I encourage you to practice by presenting in front of a mirror or to friends. You can record a 5-minute video of yourself presenting and upload it to our shared folder on Drive. I can review it and provide feedback to enhance your readiness.

Let me know if you need further assistance as you prepare for this conference. 

Audrey hit the “send” button. Then, she threw a few emails in the trash folder before she stepped out of her office.  As she stood in front of the elevator, she ran a mental checklist of her day – class, assignment grading, class, departmental meeting, check-in with an advisee, a date with Mateo, potluck. She would drive home at 5 p.m. and spend the rest of the evening reviewing the progress that her graduate assistants had made with the papers since the last research lab meeting.

The elevator slid open and revealed a male figure that became Prof. Edwin.

‘Hey! Here comes the latest grantee,’ Prof. Edwin enthused, throwing his arms open as though he expected Audrey to run into them.

Audrey quickly masked her shock with a grateful smile as she stepped into the elevator, wondering how the wind had blown the news of her win to Prof. Edwin’s ears in less than two hours. The congratulatory email from the National Science Foundation Urban Sustainability Grant Program had been one of the bold black unread subject lines waiting in her email when she arrived at the office that morning.  She was still reading the email when Dr. Sanchez called. 

‘Have you heard from NSF about your grant application? I got rejected,’ her voice carried an odd, almost exciting lilt, as though she was announcing a win.

Still processing the content of the email, Audrey had replied, ‘I am on it now. Seems I won’.

Dr. Sanchez congratulated her and hung up. Now, just two hours later, Prof. Edwin knew about her win. Who else might Dr. Sanchez have told?

‘Thank you, Prof. Edwin. It’s exhausting, and it doesn’t look like I will be catching my breath any time soon.’

‘You have earned it, Audrey. We are confident that you can deliver. Your research team is formidable, and I am happy to help if you need my support.’

With two already in the pocket out of the four grants Audrey’s research team applied for in the second half of the previous year, she hadn’t wished for this third win, but now it had happened. The deadlines for the three grant projects were close enough to make her push the “SOS” button. Before this third win, she had already been tearing out her hair, despite the 20-hour weekly commitment of each of her graduate assistants.  Her team had thrown the dice four times, now they had gotten three sixes in a row.

She stepped out of the elevator and hurried into the coffee shop on the ground floor. A cup of coffee would stimulate her brain for the heap of tasks ahead of her that day. On such days, when her calendar was all marked up, a cup of black coffee was how she said, “Good morning”. 

____________________

Audrey was 5600 miles away from Nosirat who stood behind a weathered wooden window, watching Checkmate on Mommy Ayo’s black-and-white TV. Mommy Ayo was the only tenant who owned a TV in the multi-tenement house that Nosirat lived with her mother in Iyana-Ipaja Lagos. At 13, she had been told by her mother not to think of herself as a child anymore, so she had uprooted herself from the group of children who huddled together on the rubber carpet in Mommy Ayo’s room watching soap operas and avoiding evening chores. 

While washing the dishes or cooking dinner with her mother, Nosirat would sneak a few minutes away to skulk behind Mommy Ayo’s window, glimpsing at the movie playing on the TV, struggling to distinguish the movie dialogue from the excited chatter of the children sitting on the rubber carpet. 

On weekends or days when there was no light or anything interesting to watch on Mommy Ayo’s TV, most of the tenants spent time together outside the building, the women debating how Better Life tomatoes were a better bargain than market tomatoes or when they should be making their next trip to the sawmill to gather sawdust for cooking since kerosine had become unaffordable.

‘Igba otun ku si dede,’ a man would say to another man, adjusting the towel wrapped around his waist while his chest remained bare, ‘We will be free from the grip of Khaki men. Abiola is bringing food and money.’ 

‘SDP! Progress! Na dem be the hope for a better tomorrow!” another man would enthuse.

The children would be playing Suwe or building sandcastles. 

Nosirat and her friend, Serah, would bend over a Ludo board, sitting on opposite ends of the wooden bench in the veranda.

The air would be thick with the aroma of fresh akara from Iya Adunni’s pot at the junction, less than a minute away. It was this aroma that tickled children’s nostrils with a promise of soft golden-brown balls and made 25 kobos and 50 kobos disappear from mothers’ Ovaltine cans.

_________________

Audrey threw the bouquet that Mateo gave her on the back seat as she got behind the steering wheel. This bouquet was a reflection of her life – colorful and busy. Though Mateo had tried to stretch the conversation beyond their 1-hour schedule, at 4:05, Audrey had got up, planted a kiss on his forehead, thanked him for the bouquet and drove back to campus. 

She had taken only a few bites of the smoked salmon and bagels they had ordered, trying not to have her fill before the department potluck later.  Her break-ups and career seemed to have been fueling each other – her relationships ended because her work consumed her; she worked more to escape the sting of heartbreaks. And for the past two years, she had avoided romantic entanglements altogether. 

Her work had encroached on her time with her previous boyfriends. Now that she was giving Mateo a chance, she was determined to draw the lines between her work and her personal life. So, she had set her phone to “Do Not Disturb” mode and pointedly avoided checking her emails the whole one hour she was with Mateo at the restaurant. 

She arrived at the potluck about 10 minutes late. She walked around the room exchanging pleasantries with faculty and students. Three more professors offered congratulatory remarks on her NSF grant as she moved closer to the food table. Then, a familiar aroma hit her nose; it was something from the past, it cut through the blend of aromas in the room. She allowed the aroma to guide her to its source.

And there it was! Soft golden-brown balls made of kidney beans!   

‘You want some akara?’ the black girl with a braided wig standing at the tray asked her.

‘Yes, akara!’ Audrey said excitedly, ‘Are you a Nigerian?’ 

‘Yes, Oluwasikemi Fatoki. Year one doctoral student. Environmental Policy.’ She reached out for a handshake, but Audrey gave her a hug instead.

‘Akara,’ Audrey whispered again. She picked a piece, raised it to her mouth and took a bite of yesterday. In an instant, memories from 27 years ago rushed in – She walking out of that Iyana Ipaja house into a Mercedes Benz waiting to collect her; her mother waving and dabbing her tears with the end of her wrapper; Iya Ayo telling her to “always write letter to us”. The landlady’s first daughter had given birth to a set of twin babies in America, and her husband, Jack Taylor, had allowed her to bring a young Nigerian girl to help care for the twins. Nosirat’s mother had died shortly after she left Nigeria.  

She ate more akara. As the akara filled her mouth, a longing filled her soul – the longing to return to a time untampered by deadlines, a time she didn’t have calendar annotations, a time where her day was not sliced into triangular wedges like pizza to be shared among her endless tasks, a time when there was no bills to pay or purpose to pursue, a time when she only needed to be, not to become. She longed to sit on that wooden bench again and play Ludo with Sarah without checking her email. 

She picked another piece of akara, walked out of the room and stepped into the middle place between Lagos and Washington D.C. She folded her hands across her chest as she watched Nosirat and Audrey, one enjoying a free ride on the wings of innocence, the other groaning under the loads of trophies and targets.

‘Nosirat’, she said gently, ‘you have a beautiful life. It’s sad you don’t know’. 

image credit: Volodymry Hryshchenko/unsplash

Oluyemisi Oladejo is a doctoral student and Graduate Instructor in the School of Teaching and Learning at the University of Florida, U.S.A. A Fulbright alumna, she has earned multiple prestigious national and international recognitions across literature and education spaces. Oluyemisi is also a published author of both fiction and nonfiction works. Her research interest spans girlhood and international education, and she is committed to advancing equity through scholarly inquiry and storytelling.