Where the Soil Still Remembers
By Benjamin Nketsiah
I learned early
that survival is not the same as flourishing.
In parts of Ghana,
the land does not need explanation.
You see it
in what it no longer gives.
The soil, tired.
The rivers, no longer clear.
In Kumasi,
I remember water
that held the sky.
Now it carries
what we have taken
and refused to return.
I have stood there
long enough to notice
how quickly damage
learns to look normal.
Gold leaves the ground.
The silence that follows
is harder to name.
Men arrived with machines
and permission.
Not from the land,
but from those
who could sell it.
We gathered.
We spoke where the water
used to run clean.
I remember thinking
that being heard
should not feel
so uncertain.
Nothing changed.
And still,
life continues.
Children drink
what they are given.
The body learns
what it should never
have to hold.
From a distance,
everything appears whole.
It is only when you stay
that you begin to see
the difference
between what endures
and what is alive.
That difference followed me
into the lab.
I have watched cells
under the microscope,
multiplying
as if nothing else mattered.
They expand
without listening,
until growth itself
becomes the harm.
We call it disease.
And I have wondered
how often we wait
for something to become visible
before we decide
it matters.
My grandmother had cancer.
I remember sitting
in rooms where time
moved differently.
Treatment fought the disease.
But it lost against
the quiet weight
of systems already strained
before illness arrived.
I have come to understand
that damage rarely announces itself.
It becomes familiar
before it becomes undeniable.
I have sat with students
as they wrote code
to follow the quiet shifts in water,
as they imagined sensors
that could warn
before harm becomes visible.
I have watched them pause
over small changes,
learning to take seriously
what others might ignore.
There is something hopeful
in that kind of attention.
A refusal
to wait for collapse.
A willingness
to notice early,
and to care anyway.
Learning how to remain
in relationship
with what sustains us.
To build
without standing above.
To care
without waiting for proof of damage.
To understand
that health, like a forest,
depends on what we allow
to continue.
The soil still remembers.
The rivers do too.
And I think
the remembering
has already begun.
