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We may be refugees and orphans, but we are not alone. God has given us the gift of love.

...Not many of us have done it, yet that hope pulses within us like a beacon.

Why I ran at all or with what purpose in mind is beyond my answering, but when I had no specific destination I always ran as fast as I could in the hope of finding one--and I always found one.

Makoko is what the outsiders had originally called our settlement hundreds of years ago, due to its abundance of akoko leaves, and the name stuck for the community on the Lagos coast just across from the Third Mainland Bridge. To strangers, it’s a slum, a metallic and wooden eyesore built over a stinking bed of ever-mounting sewage, spreading out across the smoke-filled horizon. For the government, it’s the impediment between even larger coffers for them and prime waterfront real estate. But to us, who are from here, Makoko is simply home.

Parents dream of us leaving Makoko and doing better than they did for them- selves, and eventually we dream it too, all the while knowing it to be an elusive fantasy.

Those who are lost look to the stars to lead them home.

All the images and impressions and countries and continents he'd vised had been erased. What you don't remember never happened.

He knows that he is beautiful and somehow this makes him ugly.

A map says to you, "Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not." It says, "I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost."

I thought back to what Jeri told me, years ago. None of us ask to be born where we are, or how we are. The challenge of life is to make the most out of what you’ve been given. And despite all of the things I don’t have…I have been given something very important. The love of others is a gift from God, and it shouldn’t be taken for granted.

He was a ferocious man. He had been ill-made in the making. He had not been born right, and he had not been helped any by the moulding he had received at the hands of society. The hands of society are harsh, and this man was a striking sample of its handiwork. He was a beast.

They were his environment, these men, and they were moulding the clay of him into a more ferocious thing than had been intended by Nature. Nevertheless, Nature had given him plasticity. Where many another animal would have died or had its spirit broken, he adjusted himself and lived, and at no expense of the spirit.