Changes by Ama Ata Aidoo

his degree examinations, and even before Fusena arrived, Ali had got a full-time job. And now he began to study part-time for a Master’s in Economics and Business Administration. Fusena on the other hand sat at home in their one- bedroomapartment or did her housework and looked through catalogues.
    When she went out, it was to shop or to window-shop. Then she became pregnant with the second baby. So from then it was being pregnant, nursing the new baby, looking after Adam and Ali, and staring at London’s bleak and wet views.
    That was hard: the rain. Fusena kept asking herself how a daughter of the dry savannas of Africa could have ended up in such a rain-soaked hole.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  And yet you would have thought that with her memory of perpetual drought, anyone would never get tired of waters or rain.
    Not Fusena. She did get tired and very quickly too. In those days, London was still very English and marked by an absence of the technological conveniences that were already being taken for granted in North America and much of Europe. Were there at least neighbourhood laundromats? Fusena could not have answered the question. There was none in her neighbourhood. So for her, London was shopping trolleys loaded with baby food and breakfast cereals; nappies steaming around a gas fire. And other permanently wet laundry which you left out in the rain, because there was no point bringing it in with hopes of taking it out again when the sun came out. The sun never shone. As for Fusena’s mind, it gradually refused to take in anything heavier than the tabloids with their sex-for-sale and other scandals. Except that she was often too busy to read much of even that.
    The rain was not the only problem Fusena had with her life as All’s wife in London. One rainy day, it occurred to her that life should offer more than marriage. That is, if the life she was leading was in fact marriage. To begin with, she was beginning to admit to herself that by marrying Ali, she had exchanged a friend for a husband. She felt the loss implied in this admission keenly, and her grief was great. The first time that this hit her, she actually sat down and wept bitterly. She also knew immediately that there was nothing she could do about her situation. Leaving Ali was not only impossible but would also not be an answer to anything. Because having married her friend and got a husband, there was no chance of her getting back her friend if she left or divorced Ali the husband. She would only have an estranged husband. Nor did it help matters much that in the middle of all her frustrations, she kept telling herself that given the position of women in society, she would rather be married than not,and rather to Ali than anyone else.
    Fusena had stared hard at London and admitted that she had another problem. It was this business of Ali getting more and more educated while she stayed the same. Sometimes she truly felt desperate. For whereas she could console herself that she would leave the wetness of London behind her once they were back home, she knew the other problems would stay with her.
    And they did. At the end of their first week back home in Ghana, Fusena knew she was pregnant with their third child. So their first couple of years back home, she was busy being pregnant, nursing another infant, helping Ali to find somewhere for them to live and making a home. By the end of those two years, she could not even remember how it felt to be in a schoolroom. Clearly, to go back to teaching after those years and what they contained was going to be hard enough even if Ali had not kept telling her that it was not really necessary.
    â€˜It is a waste of time,’ he said. ‘The hours are long and the pay is terrible.’ He would earn enough to look after all of them. Which he did. But Fusena’s dissatisfaction did not go away. After all, like nearly all West African women, she had been brought