In the past year-and-half, I have been working on a project that looks back on my life’s journey of trials and triumphs, and feel proud to say the project is now over, and will be launched late August as a book entitled, The Pen at Risk.
While reflecting on past events that have engaged my pen, I realised how quickly Ama flies even across centuries. Last weekend, I met a lady, Ama Asare Yeboah, whose tale of trauma I probed with pen in 1987 when she was two-and half years old. I was then a young lecturer and writer in Legon wearing a goatee beard.
At that age Ama, daughter of Ing Kofi and Mary Asare Yeboah, was abducted late November 1987 from their Domi home in Accra, and over days, declared missing. She had been lured by a 28-year-old woman who posed as a friend of Auntie Mary, and taken to Dansoman 22 kilometers away.
I took up Ama’s story in my ‘Mirror’ column while he she was missing, and followed the footprints of her new mother, new relations, and life within her new home, until early December, when the child thief abandoned Ama at 4 am in Palladium, Accra. My three part series in the Mirror was captioned, ‘Profile of a Child Thief.’ Naa Bea, the child thief, thereafter fled until the child was discovered and taken to the Police station.
The abductor however called Mrs Yeboah’s office to make sure the lost baby had safely reached home, then dropped the phone and drifted into ominous silence.
Despite Ama’s harrowing experience, her parents took her successfully through Achimota Preparatory School, and then University Primary at Legon; and thereafter to Achimota College. She then went for further studies in US.
Last weekend I met Ama now a young lady, at her sister Kyeiwaa’s wedding at Domi. Ama Asare Yeboah now 38 thought it was a rare opportunity for us to take a selfie together, to tell how far Providence has brought her.
But the reunion coincides with the convoluted journey of my own pen currently brewing: the story of how long I have been on this writng voyage. Gentle strokes of my pen across over these years.
Congratulations, Ama; Congratulations the Asare Yeboah family, and thank God for the gift of life 35 years on.
