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Reviewed by Asher Syed for Readers' Favorite
Walking Each Other Home Again by Laurie Oman relates how the author and her husband arrive in a remote village in Saharan Niger for a two-year Peace Corps assignment focused on health education. Laurie learns the Hausa language and settles in with community members, from the village chief to artisans and families. She helps establish a well-baby clinic, promotes maternal and child nutrition, and supports midwives during births. Laurie also takes part in cultural activities and builds connections with village children and their mothers. After completing her initial service, she returns alone to the same village three decades later, searching for the landscape and people she knew in her youth. “My heart and breathing slowed down… I didn’t feel small, as I had expected. I felt large—felt my breathing fill the space around me. I surrendered to a full and deeply satisfying aloneness.”
Walking Each Other Home Again by Laurie Oman is a beautifully observed memoir written with grace and a whole lot of heart. Oman’s talent for sensory detail brings absolutely everything to life, and one can almost feel the dry heat and hear the murmur of village life. The writing balances attentiveness and restraint, allowing readers to absorb the experiences without being told what to think. Her account of Bori rituals, for instance, is shared without spectacle or judgment. Oman juggles both Nigerien and American customs with openness, treating them not as foils but as parallel parts of a shared human story. The structure carries the shape of her whole journey, with one especially moving scene involving a night alone in the desert that builds slowly and resolves in the best way. The result is a fantastically written account that is genuinely worth the time investment.
