The clinic
A sexual health clinic in England: no bench with a malaria poster, no question about how, a nurse who did not flinch, and a leaflet with four letters on it.
I went to the clinic on Tuesday. I had put it off for a month, because the bottle from the Aba road had three months in it and because I was afraid, in a way I could not name, that a clinic here would ask the officer's question in a politer voice.
It did not. A form, which asked what I was there for and did not ask how. A nurse, a woman from somewhere in the north of England, who looked at the bottle and the card that says EVERY DAY 9PM in capital letters and said, good, that is exactly right, keep doing that. Blood. Ten minutes. Undetectable, still, seventeen times now. And then she said the thing I want on the record: it is free. All of it. Whatever your papers say, whatever the office with the numbers decides, this is free, and we do not tell them.
Then she gave me a leaflet with four letters on the front, U=U, and I said I know, and she said, most people do not, and I said, I am from Nigeria, and she said, then you especially know.
I sat in the waiting room afterwards, not waiting for anything, for a quarter of an hour. No malaria poster. A poster about PrEP, in six languages, none of them Igbo. I have written to ask them to add one. I have offered to translate it. That is the entry: I offered to translate a poster. In Owerri I would have been arrested for reading it.