Harmattan by Gavin Weston Page B

against the gable end of the building, patting the sand beside her. ‘Don’t be sad, Haoua,’ she said as I leaned against her shoulder.
    I tried hard to be strong but, eventually, just like my mother earlier that morning, I sobbed. ‘It was such a short visit,’ I said through my tears.
    Sushie put her arm around me and kissed the top of my head. ‘Hey,’ she said.
    ‘You’ll see him again soon.’

13

     Boyd
    Member No. 515820
    Ballygowrie
    Co. Down
    N. Ireland
    BT22 1AW
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
    21st October, 1998
    Haoua Boureima
Child Ref. NER2726651832
Vision Corps International
Tera Area Development Programme
C/O BP 11504 
Niamey
Republic of Niger
West Africa

Dear Haoua,
    Sorry I haven’t written for quite a while. I have been thinking of you, though, and wondering how you are getting on at school. I’m so glad you liked the photographs and books we sent. They are in English, of course, but hopefully your friend Richard will be able to help you read them. This time we are sending a book in French, which our father bought when he was in Paris last month with some of his pupils.
    Perhaps your teacher will want to read the story to your class. It is one of our favourite books – ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’, by J. K. Rowling. It’s a bit weird at first, but funny too. I hope you like it. All our other friends think it’s great.
    Love,
    Katie. X

    Dear Haoua,
    How cool that your brother came to visit your family! He sounds nice. I think that having a brother must be great. I hope the rest of your family are doing well also. Our mother says that perhaps, one day, we might have a baby brother, but our father says that we girls are enough! Our parents are well, but our great grandfather (we call him ‘Papa’) has been quite sick. As you know, he is very, very old.

    It would be lovely to hear from you again. Please give our regards to your family.
    Oh yes – we put the little picture of you, which VCI sent us, in a frame. It sits on top of our TV, in the kitchen. So now you are really like one of our family! Your friend,
    Hope. XOXO

    ***

    My heart ached for weeks after Abdelkrim returned to the capital. It was obvious to everyone that my gentle mother felt the same way. It seemed to me that the gleam in her beautiful eyes began to fade, and she carried herself differently, so that with every new day she seemed to become more like her own mother and less like mine.
    Each afternoon on the way home from school, I checked with Richard or Sushie to see if a letter had come from my brother, but none did. Katie and Hope continued to write to me, and of course I was glad to receive their letters, but I would have given up a year’s worth of their kind thoughts for just a line or two from Abdelkrim. Before his visit I had not worried about him much; now I could not get him out of my head. Perhaps I picked up on my mother’s anxiety - for anxious she certainly was - but, somehow, it was no longer possible for me to ignore occasional snippets of news from Niamey on Monsieur Letouye’s television or Sushie’s wind-up radio. Although Wadata was far removed from the unrest in the capital, we were all too aware that any upheaval there could crucially affect our village too. I had also been finding it difficult to concentrate at school too, but the prospect of reading Katie and Hope’s storybook with my class filled me with excitement. So I was greatly disappointed when Monsieur Boubacar, having read the book himself, announced that it was not suitable reading for us because it was largely about sorcery and witchcraft.
    Furthermore, he did not offer the book back to me