The night the building
came down.
Amara Okonkwo had finished marking her primary-three grammar workbooks at 11:47 p.m. on the fourteenth of March, and she was thinking about going to bed when she heard the first scream from across the road.
By the time she reached the door, the second floor of the building opposite hers was already orange. Three police officers were standing at the gate, telling people to step back. She did not step back. She stepped forward, then she stepped through them, then she ran.
"It was not a decision I made with my head," she would tell us later, sitting in a borrowed chair with her left hand still bandaged. "It was a decision my body made before my head could stop it. I just heard a child crying. I had to."
I just heard a child crying.
— Amara Okonkwo
I had to.
She would go in three more times that night. Each time the staircase was hotter. Each time fewer people would let her through. The fourth time, she would not come out alone — she would come out carrying a six-year-old girl named Ifunanya, whose mother had already been carried out by the second floor's collapse.
Ifunanya is alive. She is in primary one now, in a school three streets over from the one where Amara teaches. She does not yet know that the woman who taught her primary-three teacher how to read is the same woman who carried her down a burning staircase. Her grandmother is waiting for her to be old enough to be told.
This is a magazine, in part, about the people who do not wait to be old enough.
What they said about her, after.
“She walked past me twice. The second time she said sorry, like a teacher would.”
“My daughter is alive because a stranger ran into a building. I do not know how to thank a person for that.”
“She came in on Monday and apologised for being late. The bandage was still on her arm.”