Akwi Nji
speaker
146 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 14 Jul
Akwi Nji’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Dad died unexpectedly of cancer in the summer of 2021.
My seven siblings and I were living all over the world at the time, and we found ourselves scrambling in two fast-paced warp speed weeks to apply for emergency visas, book flights, hope the visas were approved in time, begin funeral planning from afar, and then prepare for takeoff to Cameroon, where we were all from.
Everything happened so suddenly that I didn't really have a chance to process what had happened until I was packing my luggage for the trip.
It was July, and I thought about Mom and Dad.
They met in 1978 when they were both going to school in Iowa.
They got married, they had me, Dad got his PhD, and then we high-tailed it to Cameroon, where Dad was from.
And where he was actually quite powerful because of the political work that he did, he was a voice of authority that people not only in the country but in different parts of the world respected and also adored.
So I lived with dad in Cameroon until I was about eight years old.
And then my mom and I moved back here to the States.
Dad stayed there.
And as I was growing up, Dad and I worked together on trying to maintain a transatlantic relationship, but we disagreed on just about everything.
And so by the time I was a sophomore in college, Dad wanted me to be an attorney, I wanted to be an artist.
We couldn't see eye to eye, we had an argument about it, we stopped talking to each other, and then years of silence went by.
By the time he passed away, he and I hadn't spoken to each other in more than 20 years.
And I was thinking about that with so much remorse and regret as I was packing.
I stacked a set of T-shirts into the suitcase.
I stuffed a set of tennis shoes there.
I rolled up a pair of socks and stuffed those into a pair of hiking boots, and those hiking boots were brown Timberlands of the 1990s.
I'd taken them with me on every solo hiking trip I'd been on throughout my entire adulthood.
They'd taken me through Mexico, Sedona, Hawaii, all of the rocky patches in life, literally and figuratively.
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