When I returned home from West Africa, I was glad to be back but I also felt sad, thinking that I would never again get to talk to the friends I’d made in the village where I served as a Peace Corps volunteer. There were no phones there, much less an internet. To receive mail, you had to have an address in the capital, and even then letters could take anywhere from two weeks to three months to arrive. Now that I was home, I was cut off from the people I’d been living among for the past two years.
Today, almost forty years later, my cell phone lit up as I sat down to write. It was Neneh Jallow calling from The Gambia, courtesy of Facebook Messenger. I picked up, and the line was unusually clear and free of delays. I was speaking to the little girl, now a woman, who used to come over to my house to do her homework and play with my cat. Neneh and her parents had a battered old tom who earned his keep as a mouser, not as a beloved household pet. She took after her quiet, observant father and didn’t get easily excited, but the first time she saw my kitten wiggle and leap to catch the piece of string I was dangling, she burst into peals of laughter. Whenever she came to my house after that, she cuddled and played with my pet.
Neneh is in her mid-forties now. A community-health nurse, she began her education in the village, in a one-room, mud-brick schoolhouse. A wife and the mother of four, she works as a community health nurse in the capital. She cared for her mother, Chimban, one of the best friends I’ve ever had, in the last difficult years of her life. Chimban kept telling Neneh she would never get to hear my voice again, so last year Neneh called me up on Facebook Messenger for the first time. Chimban didn’t speak English, and my Wolof had grown rusty, but we were able to say everything that mattered—that we missed each other, that we’d always remember each other. She called me by my African name. “Ehhh, Sainabou,” she kept saying, words that took me back to who I was decades before.
Facebook and other social media platforms have gotten a lot of flak lately. They’re monopolies that need to be broken up. Cannibals harvesting our data. So driven by advertising that they won’t get serious about monitoring hate speech, misinformation, and Russian interference in our elections. This may all be true, but stop and think about the people you’ve loved and lost—not because anything was wrong but because life moved on. You’ve probably reconnected with some of them on social media. If not for this amazing invention (and the ones it’s built on) the friends you found might have been lost completely.
Who have you searched out from your past? Who was the hardest to find? What was the most surprising outcome? If there’s someone you’d like to reconnect with but haven’t, I recommend doing it. Maybe like me, you’ll not only affirm a bond, but also reconnect with a part of yourself.