QUARTERS & WUNMI

She sat stroking the carpet listening to Bobby Brown. She idled down the sunny street eating burritos with her sisters, Sunmi and Funmi. She played football with her uncle’s dog in the yard. Even at 7 years old Wunmi remembers consciously feeling at home. Twenty years later she was back there. Her choice of where to study was dictated by which universities partnered with US colleges. King’s College, London offered a degree in American Studies with a year at the University of California, San Diego. And the girl who hated camping in cold, damp England became the girl who spent successive weekends eating s’mores under the stars. In her first year, she was still unfamiliar with the currency and was too embarrassed to have shop assistants wait while she worked out how to pay them in change. Her purse was heavy with dimes and quarters.  She noticed that the quarters were all different, that they each represented 1 of the 50 states. This is the collection she amassed, she is 6 short, so she’ll have to go back – to find Alaska, Iowa, Wyoming, Mississippi, New Mexico and Hawaii.

27 Oct 2013