The Weight
of Stars

The Boy from Wassa Mampong

FIRST STAR ACADEMY · WASSA MAMPONG

Before there was Moscow, before the university halls and the Red Diploma, there was Wassa Mampong: home, beginning, and the place that would remain part of me no matter how far I travelled. The people who knew me as a boy called me Dave. I am the last born and only boy on my mother's side, and the fourth son on my father's side. I grew up in a large family, surrounded by siblings and held within the world my parents had built.

My parents, Op. Kojo Amoateng and Adwoa Ntiakowaa, were farmers. Their lives were tied to the land, to the seasons, and to work that did not always promise immediate reward. Farming meant rising to meet the day, tending what had been planted, enduring uncertainty, and trusting that patience and effort might eventually produce a harvest. Those lessons were not delivered to me as formal lectures. They were lived in front of me. The farm was part of the household's reality, and I learned early that progress often begins long before anyone can see the result.

School did not remove me from that world. It gave me another one to enter. At First Star Academy in Wassa Mampong, my teachers began to recognise my promise. They saw something in my performance and encouraged my parents to keep investing in my education. Their message was not casual praise. It was a call to persevere, even when the cost was high and the future uncertain.

“Keep pushing him, even if it takes your last penny and your last breath.” — The message my teachers gave my parents

For a family whose livelihood depended on farming, supporting a child's education required more than good intentions. It required sacrifice: money directed towards school rather than other needs, time given to a future that could not be guaranteed, and the faith to keep going without knowing exactly where the road would lead. The belief of my teachers strengthened the belief my parents already carried. Long before I could explain what I wanted to become, adults around me were asking my family not to let my potential go unrealised.

And I myself was looking far beyond the boundaries of my immediate surroundings. As a child, I dreamed of the stars. My ambition was specific: I wanted to become an astronomer and work with NASA. The night sky suggested a world much larger than the one I could see from home. I imagined studying distant objects, asking questions about the universe, and making a life out of curiosity. I could not have known how different my eventual academic path would become. But the impulse beneath that childhood dream—the desire to understand a world larger than the one immediately in front of me—would stay with me.

My story would eventually take me into geography, political science, population and development, and public administration. Those subjects were not astronomy, but they also asked me to look beyond what was immediately visible: to examine how people live, how places change, how institutions shape opportunity, and how decisions made in one setting affect lives in another. The direction changed; the instinct to ask bigger questions did not disappear.

For all the distance my imagination could travel, my life remained rooted in home. During school holidays and university vacations, I returned to Wassa Mampong and to the farm. Education might take me away for a term or a year, but it did not sever the connection to the people and work that had formed me. The farm was not simply a place I came from. It was a reminder of the labour behind my opportunities and the family whose sacrifices made each next step possible.

Years later, when I would find myself far from Ghana, I would carry more than memories of a hometown. I would carry the example of two farmers who kept working, the voices of teachers who urged them to keep pushing, and the knowledge that a future can begin in a place the world may never think to look for it.

The City That Almost Swallowed Me

SIMMS SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL · KUMASI · 2013–2016

Some of the memories from these years survive in photographs: school uniforms, friends gathered between lessons, books open in the classroom, and the easy playfulness of young people growing up together. The photographs in the gallery are not illustrations of a distant past; they are pieces of that past, preserved in the ordinary moments that often become precious with time.

In 2013, passing the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) opened a door—and asked me to walk away from the familiar environment (home). Senior high school meant leaving Wassa Mampong for Kumasi, a larger, busier city with a different pace and a different set of expectations. For a boy who had grown up close to my parents and siblings, the move was not only a change of school. It was a first test of distance, independence, and adaptation.

People who knew how attached I was to home worried about whether I would cope. I had been surrounded by family; now I would have to learn how to manage a new academic environment and the demands that came with it. My parents found a way to soften the transition. Rather than sending me straight into the full experience of boarding school, they arranged for me to attend as a day student and stay with elder siblings. It was a practical compromise: I could pursue the opportunity in Kumasi while remaining connected to the family support that mattered to me.

I enrolled at Simms Senior High School, where I studied General Arts (Elective Mathematics, Geography, Economics, and Government) from 2013 to 2016. The first year challenged the image I had carried of myself as a student. In junior high school, I had been used to performing among the top students. At Simms, surrounded by a wider field of capable classmates, I placed 31st out of 55 students. The result forced me to confront a new reality: being capable did not mean that every new environment would immediately reward me with the position I expected.

That first ranking could have become a verdict on my ability. Instead, it became a starting point. Improvement did not arrive as one dramatic breakthrough. It came through a sequence of results that, taken together, showed what persistence could do. I moved from 31st to 9th, then 7th, then 5th, and eventually reached 2nd place. Each step mattered because it represented movement from the position where I had first found myself. The progress was not a straight line from confidence to success; it was the work of adjusting, learning, and continuing after an uncomfortable beginning.

I did not arrive at the top because the new environment was easy. I learned how to meet it.

The numbers tell one part of the story. The deeper change was that I had begun to discover that I could adapt. The boy who had been carried by the familiarity of home was learning to find his footing in a larger world. Kumasi was not simply a city I had to survive; it was a place that taught me how to respond when my old measures of success no longer guaranteed a result.

In 2016, I completed senior high school and passed the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE). I left Simms with more than an examination result. I had evidence that a disappointing beginning did not have to determine the ending, and that my position could change if I was willing to keep working. It was a lesson I would need again—at university, in employment, and later in a country where almost everything around me would be unfamiliar.

At Simms, I remember Francis, Raphael (Misty), Adams, Etuo, Bimpong, Stunna, Mawuli, Ama Samaa, Nadjat, Ceci, Florence, Abayie, Rashida, Bright, Kodua (Koliko), John, Daniel, Debora, Gafar, Immy Darling, Joshua, Kpantey, Linda, Lawrence, Lizzy, Wendy, Dorothy, and the Mampong Squad—Sarpong, Kwarteng, and the rest of the crew. I also remember my teachers: Nana Poku, Prof., Madam Eunice, and every teacher who taught, corrected, encouraged, and helped me along the way. The list cannot be complete, and any omission is unintentional; I offer it in gratitude, not as a ranking of who mattered.

The Vandal

UNIVERSITY OF GHANA, LEGON · ACCRA · 2017–2021

The University of Ghana was not my original plan. I had expected to apply to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), and I had already bought the application forms. The University of Cape Coast was also part of the possibilities I considered, but its process did not move as I had hoped. Then my niece encouraged me to try Legon: apply and see what happened. It was a simple suggestion, but sometimes a life-changing turn begins with somebody asking you to consider a possibility you had not taken seriously enough.

I applied to the University of Ghana. An admission offer came, and an offer from KNUST followed as well. I now had a choice that had not been part of my first plan. I chose Legon. In retrospect, the university I had not initially set out to attend would become one of the defining places of my life.

From 2017 to 2021, I studied for a Bachelor of Arts in Geography & Resource Development and Political Science. The combination gave me ways to think about both place and power: how land and resources are used, how societies organise themselves, and how political decisions shape the distribution of opportunities and burdens. My interests were still developing. At one point, I had hoped to pursue law, and the admissions route to the Ghana School of Law occupied my thinking between 2018 and 2020. The process reshaped my plans. I returned my attention to Geography, a discipline that would eventually connect my academic training to questions of land, livelihoods, resource extraction, and environmental governance.

University was not only about choosing a discipline or earning grades. It was also about learning how to inhabit a larger intellectual and social world. At Legon, I became a member of Commonwealth Hall, the all-male traditional hall whose students and alumni are known as Vandals. It was a family I had not imagined joining, yet it became one of the most meaningful fraternities of my life.

To outsiders, the word Vandal can suggest destruction. To those who understand the hall, it carries a different meaning: a brotherhood built around being one another’s keeper. The VANDAL identity is often explained through six traits—Vivacious, Affable, Neighbourly, Devoted, Altruistic, and Loyal—and the hall motto, Truth Stands, expresses a sense of identity that reaches beyond campus. Commonwealth Hall has been home to people who have gone on to serve in public life, law, academia, sport, faith communities, banking, business, and many other fields. For me, its greatest significance was personal: the friends who became family, the solidarity, and the knowledge that I belonged to a community whose ties could travel with me.

One of those people was Silas, the founder of the IANJAP poetry community. I met Silas during my early days on campus. Silas recognised that I had ideas and a voice that could become more confident if I was encouraged to use them. That encouragement mattered. Confidence is sometimes described as an individual quality, as if people simply possess it or lack it. My experience was different: another person helped create the conditions in which I could practise speaking, contribute to group discussions, and become more comfortable expressing what I thought.

Through Silas and the IANJAP community, I encountered people and spaces that expanded my social world. The importance of those connections was not limited to the immediate friendships they produced. They helped me understand that personal growth often happens in company—that somebody else can notice a strength before you know how to name it, and that a community can give you room to develop a capacity you might otherwise leave unused.

Then, in 2020, COVID-19 disrupted university life. The campus emptied, familiar routines broke apart, and the ordinary ways students built relationships and studied together were interrupted. Masks, uncertainty, and distance became part of everyday life. The photographs from that period carry a different mood from the graduation portraits that would follow: a reminder that this degree was completed through disruption, not in spite of a perfectly smooth university experience. Digital communication became a substitute for the physical closeness of campus. Friendships had to be maintained across distance, and academic life had to adjust to a crisis no student had planned for.

When the university reopened, the rhythm was still unusual. The double-track arrangement separated groups of students into different periods, including the 100 and 400 levels and the 200 and 300 levels. The university experience that might once have unfolded in a more continuous way became compressed and divided. I had to continue through a disrupted academic landscape, adapting once again rather than waiting for circumstances to become ideal.

I completed the degree. In November 2021, I graduated from the University of Ghana with First Class Honours, earning a final grade point average of 3.62 out of 4.00. The university’s January 2022 congregation record carried the achievement in formal print: Bachelor of Arts, Geography and Resource Development and Political Science, First Class Honours. It was a major achievement, but it also closed a chapter that had changed me. Legon had been an unexpected destination, a place where I refined my academic direction, found community, developed confidence, and learned to keep going through disruption.

There are too many people to fit into a single paragraph, but their names belong somewhere in this story. At Legon, I remember Silas, Sammy, Zuta, Syram, Ben, Joyce, Julie, Diana, Mike, Nana Ama, Irene, Juanita, Jennifer, Bridget, Kelvin, Kezia, Precious, Koomson, and Julius Djaba—among course mates, group mates, and friends. I remember the Commonwealth Hall brothers who made the hall feel like family: Affram, Dkay, Illegal, Kizito, Martino, Regi, Nat, Donne, Afari, Micky, Pioto, Richmond, Abu, Chase, Kaeff, Fabio, Facebook, Buti, Ebern (ACA 2), Emma, Ibra, Inusah, Xavier, Michael, Jarvis, John, Kobby, Carlos, Lebron, Jessie, Squitto, SP, SNR Ben, Leslie, Lyrics, Muscles, Negus, Muniru, Shef, Sly, Trigger, Henry, Kreamy, Peterson, Ben, Listo, and many others.

Michael, my roommate in Levels 100 and 200, is remembered here with love: may his soul rest in peace. These friendships made university more than lectures and grades; they made it conversations, shared pressure, laughter, and people I carried with me beyond Ghana.

My study group was its own circle, and I want to remember it distinctly: Sammy (our group founder), Silas, Ben, Mike, Joyce (Nhyi), Julie, Diana, Nana Ama, Maryann, and Zuta. We spent long hours working through assignments, preparing presentations, and helping one another make sense of university life. Some names naturally appear in more than one part of my memories because friendships overlapped, but each group had its own place in my experience.

Commonwealth Hall was a different kind of classroom. Its lesson was brotherhood: being a V-Mate meant being part of a community that looked after its own. The familiar greeting, “V-Mate!” and the response, “Sharp!”, carried a sense of recognition that could make a large university feel smaller. People may hear the word “Vandal” and think of vandalism; I came to understand it as a name attached to loyalty, neighbourliness, devotion, altruism, and a shared conviction that truth stands. I had not expected to join this fraternity. I left Legon knowing it had become one of the families I would carry with me.

I had once imagined the universe through a telescope now had a degree that trained me to study the relationship between people, places, resources, and political life. My interests had changed shape, but the impulse to look closely at the world—and to ask why it worked as it did—remained.

The Long Wait

NATIONAL SERVICE · PRESEC LEGON · 2021–2022 · EARLY PROFESSIONAL LIFE

Graduation is often presented as the moment when effort finally turns into opportunity. For me, it was an achievement and a beginning, but it did not immediately provide a clear next step. I had completed a demanding degree with First Class Honours. Now I had to work out how that achievement would translate into employment and a future beyond university.

My first responsibility after graduation was national service. From 2021 to 2022, I served at Presbyterian Boys' Secondary School (PRESEC), Legon, supporting teaching and assessment in social science subjects. The role brought me to the other side of the classroom. I had once been the student whose teachers urged my parents to keep pushing; now I was helping young people learn, preparing lessons and assessments, and supporting their academic development.

Teaching offered a different view of education. It showed me that the classroom is not only a place where information is delivered. It is also a place where young people are being prepared for futures they may not yet be able to picture. At PRESEC, Madam Ophelia became more than a supervisor: she was a mentor and, in many ways, a mother to me. Her guidance helped me navigate that first professional responsibility, and her place in this story reflects the kind of care that can shape a young person's confidence long after a formal role has ended.

When national service ended, the next step did not arrive immediately. There was a long period of uncertainty—around eight months in which I applied for opportunities and waited for something to take shape. The gap between academic achievement and a stable professional path can be difficult to explain to people who see only the final certificate. A degree records what has been accomplished; it cannot guarantee how quickly the world will make room for the graduate who holds it.

For me, that period required a different kind of endurance from the one I had needed at school. There was no class ranking to improve, no examination timetable that made the next milestone clear. There were applications, uncertainty, and the difficult experience of watching time pass without knowing when an opportunity would come. The waiting did not erase my achievements, but it tested what I believed those achievements could make possible.

Eventually, I secured a role as a Risk and Compliance Officer at Pacific Savings and Loans PLC in Kumasi. The opportunity came with help from Ohemaa (Stella), my girlfriend, and her brother Ken, who helped open the door. Their role belongs in this part of the story because progress is rarely the product of effort alone. People make introductions, offer encouragement, and help others reach opportunities they might not be able to access by themselves.

In my role, I worked with regulatory compliance, operational risk assessment, internal audit, branch monitoring, compliance reporting, and related control processes. My department head, Mr Kofi Poku, and senior colleague, Kwame Danu, were important figures in that chapter. I also remember the then Managing Director, Mr Seth Owusu-Brobbey (may his soul rest in peace), who once told me that he had seen great things in me from the day I came for the interview. Those words became a source of encouragement in a period when I was still finding my professional footing.

I am grateful as well to Madam Eunice Acheampong, the HR Manager; Mr Francis Tano, the Finance Manager; Danny, the Accountant; Kenneth Acheampong, the then HR Officer; Josephine, Operations Officer; Mike, Accounts Officer; Aseda Boateng, IT Officer; Mr Nurudeen, Kumasi Main Branch Manager; and colleagues at the head office and across the various branches who supported my work and my stay at Pacific Savings and Loans. This acknowledgement is intentionally broad: a workplace is made by many people whose help does not always appear in a job description, but whose presence can make a difficult season manageable and meaningful.

I was grateful for the opportunity and took the work seriously. Yet employment did not extinguish my desire to continue studying and to build a life that connected more directly with my academic interests. I had earned a first-class degree, but I did not want that achievement to be the final measure of what I might become. The next chapter had not yet announced itself. For a time, I had to work, wait, and keep the possibility of a different future alive.

What I could not yet see was that a relationship from my past would soon help make that future more concrete.

Zeroman’s Call

GHANA → MOSCOW · NOVEMBER 2023 – SEPTEMBER 2024

In November 2023, a call came from someone who had known me long before university, employment, or international ambitions entered the picture. Zeroman, as he was known as Douglas Adjei was my primary and junior high school classmate, an academic rival, partner in crime, and a brother in Christ. Our history included competition: Zeroman was the classmate who made it difficult for me to claim the first position in class. But the rivalry was only one part of the relationship. Beneath it was a friendship that had survived the years and could still become important in a new season.

“Why are you still in Ghana after graduating with first class?” — Zeroman, November 2023

The question landed differently from ordinary encouragement. It asked me to look again at a situation I had begun to accept. I had a first-class degree and professional experience, but the path to further study abroad did not seem obvious. I did not feel I had the international connections or the clear route that could turn the idea into a practical plan. Over time, the absence of a visible route had begun to feel like evidence that there might be no route at all.

Zeroman challenged that conclusion. Rather than treating the situation as settled, we began working through the possibilities. The months that followed involved applications, requirements, forms, deadlines, and the many small administrative tasks that stand between an ambition and a real opportunity. It was not enough to want a different future; we had to translate the desire into steps that could be completed.

That work gave our friendship a new meaning. The schoolboy who had once competed with me was now helping me move towards an opportunity beyond Ghana. Zeroman did not simply tell me to dream bigger and leave me to work out the rest alone. He became part of the process that made the dream actionable. Our story is a reminder that rivalry need not end in resentment, and that people who once pushed one another to perform can later help one another advance.

There was another important part of the story behind that decision. In the same year Zeroman called, I had applied to seven universities for a master’s degree: Penn State University, Brunel University, the University of Leeds, the University of Aberdeen, the University of Manchester, the University of Twente, and HSE University in Moscow. I received admission offers from all seven. But admission was not the same as being able to afford the opportunity. Twente’s funding offer covered only up to about 70% of the costs; the UK options generally offered around 50% or, in some cases, no funding at all. Those gaps were too large for me to bridge comfortably as an international student. HSE offered a fully funded scholarship, making it the realistic path forward. That is how Russia became my destination—and Zeroman’s call helped set the process in motion.

In September 2024, I left Ghana for Moscow to begin my master's studies at HSE University. The journey was more than a flight between two countries and continents. It meant leaving familiar people, places, food, routines, and the everyday signs of home. It meant moving from a farming community in Ghana to a large Russian city whose climate, language, and social rhythms were unfamiliar. The distance was geographical, but it was also emotional and practical: in a new country, even ordinary tasks can demand patience and attention.

The cold was among the first things I had to confront. Wassa Mampong, Kumasi, and Accra had not prepared me for Moscow's winter conditions. The environment made the difference between home and the new country impossible to ignore. Beyond the weather, there was the work of learning how things functioned, navigating unfamiliar systems, and finding my place in a setting where the cues I had relied on in Ghana could no longer guide every decision.

But I did not arrive to face all of this alone. Zeroman was waiting at the airport. He helped me get to the dormitory, complete the registration process, and deal with essential arrangements. Those practical acts mattered. When a person arrives in a new country, help with accommodation and administration is not a small gesture; it can make the first days less overwhelming and turn a strange city into a place where life can begin.

He met me at the airport and helped me settle into the dormitory. In that moment, friendship became practical: someone was there to help me begin.

My move to Moscow was not the work of one person alone. My parents' sacrifices, the teachers who encouraged them, the confidence I developed at Legon, Ohemaa's support, Ken's help, and Zeroman's intervention all belonged to the longer chain of events that brought me there. Still, Zeroman's call was the turning point that helped convert a stalled ambition into a concrete journey. It reminded me that a future can remain possible even when you cannot yet see the way to reach it.

HSE Is Not for the Weak

HSE UNIVERSITY · MOSCOW, RUSSIA · 2024–2026

Arriving in Moscow was a milestone, but arrival and belonging are not the same thing. I had reached the place I had worked towards, yet the work of becoming a student in a new country was only beginning. HSE University—the National Research University Higher School of Economics—placed me in a new academic environment and asked me to grow beyond the habits and assumptions I had carried from home.

My programme was the Master’s in Population and Development. The field of study was 38.04.04 Public Administration. The distinction matters: Population and Development was the master's programme, while Public Administration was the field of study classification. The programme brought me into a wider conversation about population processes, development, institutions, and public policy, extending the questions that had begun to take shape during my undergraduate studies.

The transition demanded adjustment on several fronts. The climate was harsh compared with the Ghana I knew. Familiar routines were gone, family was far away, and the language and culture of daily life could make even ordinary experiences feel unfamiliar. Academic work had its own demands, and I had to find ways to meet those demands while building a life in a different country. The independence that had once meant travelling from Wassa Mampong to Kumasi now meant learning to manage an international life at a much greater distance from home.

There were difficult moments. Homesickness could make the distance feel heavier; academic pressure could make the next task seem larger than the one before it. The people whose encouragement had supported me through earlier stages were no longer physically close. Ohemaa, my family, and the friends who knew my history were in Ghana, while I was trying to establish myself in Moscow. The achievement of getting there did not make the experience effortless. In some ways, it made the responsibility feel greater: I had crossed so much distance, and I wanted the sacrifice behind that journey to mean something.

At such moments, the earlier chapters of my life became more than memories. I had been the student who placed 31st before working my way to 2nd. I had navigated a university route I had not originally planned, adjusted to COVID-era disruption, completed a first-class degree, and endured a long wait for employment. None of those experiences had guaranteed an easy next step. Each had taught me that a difficult beginning did not have to settle the final outcome.

My studies also gave me the opportunity to bring my academic interests into sharper focus. My master's thesis examined The Impact of Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining on Agricultural Livelihoods in Wassa-Amenfi East, Ghana. The research connected questions of mining-related land-use change with agricultural productivity, household income, food security, and the ways rural households respond to pressure on their livelihoods. Through household research, quantitative and qualitative analysis, and supporting spatial evidence, I examined a set of questions rooted in Ghana but connected to wider debates about resource extraction, environmental change, governance, and development.

The choice of topic also brought my academic journey back towards the landscape that had shaped my earliest life. I had grown up in a farming family, watching the labour and uncertainty that accompany work on the land. My research on mining and agricultural livelihoods was not simply an abstract exercise in environmental policy. It asked how changes in land and resource use affect the conditions under which people make a living. The questions were academic, but the stakes were recognisably human: land, work, income, food, and the ability of households to adapt when their surroundings change.

Alongside the thesis, my research experience included an internship examining everyday practices and discourses around artisanal and small-scale gold mining in Ghana, quantitative work on fertility and female education using Ghana Demographic and Health Survey data, and comparative public-administration research on responses to population ageing. Together, these projects show a widening set of interests—from rural livelihoods and environmental governance to demographic change and public policy—held together by a common concern with how social conditions and institutions shape people's lives.

My time at HSE also formed part of a broader development as a researcher. The work required me to move between questions, evidence, and methods: to consider what household data could show, what qualitative material could help explain, what policy documents revealed about institutions, and where spatial evidence could support a social-science argument. My interest in GIS and remote sensing remained useful as supporting tools, but the central questions were increasingly about people, governance, livelihoods, and the consequences of environmental change.

By June 2026, I had completed the Master's in Population and Development at HSE University with Distinction, earning a GPA of 8.42 out of 10 and receiving a Red Diploma / Master's with Honors. The achievement was significant in its own right. It also carried the meaning of everything that had come before it: the farm in Wassa Mampong, the teachers who urged my parents to keep investing in me, the climb through the rankings at Simms, the uncertain path to Legon, the first-class degree, the months of waiting, the professional experience in Kumasi, the call from Zeroman, and the courage I needed to begin again in Moscow.

My HSE years were made possible not only by the scholarship or the university itself, but by the people who helped me learn, adjust, and belong. Professor Arnab Roy Chowdhury supervised both my internship project and my thesis. He is now also my academic collaborator, and we are working together on research papers. I am grateful to the Population and Development programme study office and academic staff, especially my programme supervisor Alexander Larionov, programme mentor Professor Ilya Emorlin, and programme manager Ekaterina.

I also carry warm memories of HSE Dormitory 1 and the people who shared those two years with me. To my roommates and dormitory friends BOS, Habib, Henry, Akwesi, and Rejoice, thank you for sharing everyday life through my first and second years. To my classmates and the people with whom I did most of my assignments, group work, and presentations—Ofori (DJ General), George, Andrews, Vanessa, and Seedy L.—thank you for the collaboration and support. I have not forgotten Mariam, Archer, Bridget, Apostle, Wess, Vicky, Kelvin, Brilliant, Feddy, James, and all my other colleagues and course mates. Each of you is part of what made Moscow a place where I could grow.

Looking back, the journey does not appear as a simple sequence in which every achievement naturally followed the previous one. It was made up of uncertainty, changed plans, support from other people, hard work, and moments when the next step was not obvious. The story matters because the result cannot be separated from the path: the people who believed, the people who helped, the places that tested me, and the decision to continue even when progress was difficult to measure.

“From the classroom of First Star Academy in Wassa Mampong
to the corners of Simms Senior High School in Kumasi,
to the friendships and questions that shaped me at Legon,
through the long wait after graduation,
and on to the winter streets and lecture rooms of Moscow —

I kept moving, not because the road was always clear,
but because the people and experiences behind me
had taught me not to mistake a difficult chapter for the end.

The stars I once dreamed of studying from afar
turned out to be the ones I was made of all along.”