A Letter to 21-Year-Old Vickie

For every African girl and woman who wants to shape the world

[Photo: Turning 21 at Roach’s Bar, Haverford, November 2005, with Michelle, Amie and Sonia. Club soda in hand, and a blast anyway.]

Dear Vickie,

It's your 21st birthday, and you're walking into Roaches in Haverford, Pennsylvania, for the first time. It's your senior year. Michelle, Sonia and Amie are with you, and everyone is buying drinks. You order something without alcohol, and you have an absolute blast anyway.

Remember that night. You don't have to drink what everyone else is drinking to enjoy the room. Twenty-one years later, you still don't drink, and you still love a night out with your friends. That isn't stubbornness. It's knowing who you are, and you'll need it.

You've just come back from Salone

That summer you were in Freetown, volunteering at the Forum for African Women Educationalists, the school Christiana Thorpe founded after the war. It was for girls whose education the war had stolen.

You taught English in class six. You'll never forget that classroom: a ten-year-old girl sitting next to a sixteen-year-old who was already a young woman, in the same class and on the same lesson. That gap in ages showed everything the country had been through, and you could see the war in it.

So you taught with songs and play. You brought them Nas's "I Can," the song about believing you can become anything if you work for it, and you sang it together every single day. You wanted those girls to believe it.

Here's what I need you to hear, Vickie: you were singing it to yourself too.

You think you're keeping a diary

Right now you're writing your senior thesis on Sierra Leone as a weak state. You're laying out, footnote by footnote, how the country got here: weak institutions, no real rule of law, a broken and fragmented justice system. You're good at diagnosing what's wrong.

Next month, in December 2005, you'll start a little website to store your photos from FAWE and your thoughts about home. You'll call it SwitSalone (Sweet Sierra Leone). You think you're keeping a diary.

You're not. You're building a platform that will carry Sierra Leone's stories for twenty years.

You spent your senior year proving Sierra Leone was a weak state. You'll spend the next twenty years refusing to let that be the whole story.

Nobody is reading yet. Write anyway.

In 2007 you'll move home. You'll keep documenting Salone with your fish-out-of-water, just-came-back eyes: photographing, blogging, writing. For years, hardly anyone at home will read it, because so few people are online. Your audience will be the diaspora, expats. Do it anyway. The beginning doesn't need a large audience or a fan base. It needs you to show up.

Three years later, you'll go on national TV with The Vickie Remoe Show. You'll open every episode with your own words, "Me na Vickie Remoe. a don go oversea small, but a don come back na tong," and you'll tell Sierra Leone's stories to Sierra Leoneans.

Nobody will tell you that what you're doing is journalism. You won't have the language for it, and some days you'll feel like an imposter. Keep going. In 2011 you'll leave for Columbia Journalism School (the world’s best journalism program), and when you graduate in May 2012 you'll finally have the words. You'll look back at that TV work and think: this was solid. I'm really, really good at this.

You were good before anyone gave it a name.

Also, one day you'll read your early SwitSalone posts and cringe at all those lowercase i's. Publish anyway. The girl who waits until it's perfect never starts.

Stop holding it alone

When you leave for Columbia, you'll be scared SwitSalone will die because you can't be home to write it. So you'll do the bravest thing: you'll reach out to young people in Sierra Leone and say, help me keep this alive. They'll write, you'll edit, and the work will grow deeper than anything you could have done alone.

The thing you're building only becomes big when you stop holding it by yourself.

The warning

There's one bad habit a wish a kin pul pan you right now. Girl, you’re too judgmental. You hold your family to too high an ideal but your friends you’ll put on a pedestal.

You love your friends with no lines. If you have money, they have money. If you have access, they have access. If you have a family, they have a family. You’ll labor for your friends. You’ll be met with ingratitude. Your generosity is beautiful. Don't lose it.

But Vickie, you are too quick to close the door on your own blood. When a sibling falls out with Daddy, or fityai wi granny, or does something you disapprove of, you decide they're finished. You'll go years without speaking to some of them, and you'll call it principle when it's really judgment.

Forgive faster. Call your brothers and sisters. Pour into your family the way you pour into your friends.

Because when you look at your life at 42, the people who stood the test of time, who helped you build and who showed up again and again, are your family.

To every young woman reading this

Maybe you were the ten-year-old in class six, or the sixteen-year-old who lost years to things she didn't choose. Maybe you're 21 and keeping a "diary" that's really the start of something.

Start before you're ready. Do the work before you know what it's called. Let others help you carry it. And hold your family close.

You can be what you want to be. I know because a 21-year-old girl from Salone once believed it, and here I am.

With love, and with pride,

Vickie, at 42

Me na Vickie Remoe. a don go oversea small, but a don come back na tong.

#VickieRemoeDay