 She's the author of the Nigerian Nordic Girls' Guide to Lady Problems, a witty, tricultural look at black women and fibroids, and meeting Faith, a travel memoir about becoming Thailand's first black Buddhist nun, which received a pen beyond margins award for best memoir of 2004. Please welcome Faith. I'm gonna read a couple of little bits, one from the e-book, Nigerian Nordic Girls' Guide to Lady Problems, because I love saying that title, and it comes from, it's just been released in anthology, a she-books anthology, and so I'm just gonna read a little excerpt from it. Is this on? Are you all hearing me? Why are you so well-behaved? You're freaking me out. I dragged myself out of my death bed, actually, to come here. Don't kiss me afterwards, I have that horrible virus. I didn't come to graduate school 10 years after finding my unknown father and siblings in Nigeria to get tumors, one the size of a grapefruit. I came to write about finding my unknown father and siblings in Nigeria, and about being raised by my Nordic immigrant mother, and about what a bad sister I am. So the change, heavy painful periods that last two weeks at a time, and that a parade of blonde doctors at student health ascribes to the stress of moving to Iowa, where nothing ever happens, stressful or otherwise, irritates me. Do something, my friends goad, and reluctantly I go online. The preliminary symptoms suggest fibroids, which the Surgeon General's online medical dictionary, so that's what a Surgeon General does, defines as benign tumors that grow in or on the uterus. Tumors, the threat of the word slyly undercut by the soft promise of benign. How can something be both frightening and friendly? Explain. The general continues. They are often embedded in the wall of the uterus, but may also be attached to the outside to the inner lining. I can't picture this, though it's intriguing. They can be any size. The largest recorded fibroid weighed 140 pounds. Take that to the Iowa State Fair. Forget about county's biggest bore and life-sized butter sculpture of the Last Supper. We've got a tumor the size of its host. Prevention. Since no one knows what causes fibroids, there is no prevention. The fatalism in the Surgeon General's statement seems almost un-American. I'm about to find out why. I think I might have fibroids, I announced to the gynecologist at student health. It is April, eight months since my arrival to Iowa, eight months since calling for an appointment. I prepared to dazzle her with my research. After all, I'm black, 36, I never met pregnant and my mother has them. Plus, I've been having these problems with my period. It's doubtful. She cuts me off, snapping on a pair of latex gloves. She moves towards me. Was there anything else? Yes, I say. I've been on the pill for a while now and I'm getting older. I'm thinking of getting pregnant in a year or two, so I wanted to discuss my options. She smiles with characteristic Iowa sunshine, avert her eyes and launches into brochures speak. Well, yes, of course. Most of us are choosing to focus on our careers and it is more difficult to get pregnant as we get older, but that's a decision every woman has to make for herself. There are plenty of books to read in the medical library. Defeated, I lie back and part my legs. My goodness, she exclaims, your uterus is huge. I'm thinking it could be fibroids. Well, at least you're thinking. She schedules me for an ultrasound. And then what? Usually nothing. She shrugs. They're benign. That means friendly, not particularly harmful nor helpful. Like Iowans, a friend suggests. Yes, become a writer and work out your issues. Ultrasound. The white blonde med student maneuvers the probe with great jabs glaring at the Sonnegan screen. It's not often we get to do an ultrasound for tumors the radiologist admits from behind the med student shoulder. Once I'm already naked on the table, knees up, legs parted, some Iowa farm girl with hair like corn silk with her arm halfway up my vagina. This is a great learning moment for us. It is indeed a great moment. I concede the vaginal probe ultrasound. It sounds like a B movie at the drive-in. Is this surprise announcement what passes in the world of Iowa for obtaining my consent? I close my eyes, visualize an idealized landscape as my housemate's book on nutritional healing advises. I'm guessing it actually helps to enjoy nature in the first place. So that's part of that. And you can buy the ebook and find out more adventures in my uterus. So I'm going to read something that's my characteristic kind of dark humor. It's got genocide in it, but it's still fun. I promise, like most of my things have fun genocide. So the other exciting thing that happened today is that my BFF had twins at age 52. He didn't have them himself. He rented a uterus. Bought an egg, rented a uterus. But it turned out it was twins even though it wasn't supposed to be twins. Usually you think in vitro, but you just put one egg in the surrogate and it split into two. And everyone's like, oh my god, what's happening? And so they're making a huge deal about it. They had to have ultrasounds, vaginal probes, ultrasounds every two weeks. And my husband and I were just cracking up because every child in Nigeria is a twin. So we're just like, what? Americans get all excited about the fact that they're having two. We do that all the time. So ironically, the title of my next book, my epic memoir, is called Twins. And so this is the prologue from twins. And it starts with an epigraph from Jonathan Rabin. For imagination and memory are Siamese twins and you cannot cut them so cleanly apart. On the very day I turned 26, three weeks before I go in search of both the twins and the father who abandoned me at birth, a set of conjoined twins is born in eastern Nigeria, my father's homeland. After two years in Thailand, I cannot help but see it as a sign, Nigerian Siamese twins. It's ironic that the original so-called Siamese twins, Chang and Ang were tied, as Asia has the lowest twinning rate on the globe, only one in 125 births. At a staggering one in 22, on the other hand, Nigeria leads the world. Conjoined twins are supposedly uniformly rare, only one in 55,000 births. But here again, Nigeria excels. The University of Nigeria is giddy. In the four years between 1987 and 1991, its teaching hospital will attempt the surgical separation of three sets of conjoined multiples. The year before my arrival, Pagopagus triplets survived separation at the buttocks. The year after my departure, Isiopagus twins joined at the pelvis do not. From the moment I set foot on campus, local news blares updates on the middle set, Craniopagus twins who share a skull and my birthday. It will be Nigeria's moment to show the world what it can do. It might be infamously corrupt, in the grip of yet another brutal military dictator crippled by rioting students and punitive policies from world lenders, but no one can contest Nigerian brain power. The nation boasts the highest number of MDs and PhDs on the continent. Nigerian immigrants are the most highly educated groups in the U.S. and UK. They're offspring outperforming and outscoring American and British school children. Here's a fun drinking game. Welcome to any hospital anywhere on the earth and ask for the Nigerian doctor. Any university and ask for the full professor or dean. Stagger to your next destination. Fall down drunk. Fast forward 22 years and Nigeria will make its mark in nearly every arena of Western public life. Television, films, sports, music, fashion, art, literature. The richest black person in the world will be Nigerian. Nigeria's first female finance minister will direct the world bank. The first black to be crowned Miss World, Nigerian. At some point it will become clear. We have come for your women and jobs. You can laugh. This Nigerian quality will be exceeded only by Nigerian quantity. 13 years after its inception, Nollywood will become the world's third largest producer of movies. Nigeria will become Africa's second largest economy and the world's fourth largest democracy. Off and on. One out of every five Africans will be Nigerian in the world. One out of every 10 blacks. Nigerian ascendancy aside, craniopagus twins are rare, accounting for only 2% of all conjoined multiples. The operation will be the first successful one of its kind. The government announces that the surgery will be broadcast live on national TV. It will dazzle and inspire and unite a polarized populace, north versus south, Muslim versus Christian, feudal versus democratic, that has been at its chudder's throat since the British first shackled two protectorates together in 1960 and called us a country. It will be the clean, painless separation the Republic couldn't quite manage during the Civil War. So on June 6, 1989, students at the University of Nigeria stopped rioting, putting down their wooden planks and Molotov cocktails and ancient handguns and assemble in parlors and common rooms across the southeast, generators humming to watch the bloody medical marvel. The clouds crusted around the static television sets leaning forward intently recall the Apollo launches of my childhood, one small step this time for black man. The doctors announced that the three month olds are a total vertical craniopagus. Despite having two brains with separate arteries, the infant share vein systems are conjoined at all four lobes frontal, parietal, exhibitable and temporal. Given the state of the nation's hospitals, the operation seems like madness. I tug on sleeves, worry the crowd. Do they have enough generators? I plead lots of backup generators. I mean really huge not made in China industrial sized generators. It's a serious question ranked 10th in global oil and gas reserves Nigeria will eventually become Africa's largest oil producer and the world's sixth largest exporter. And yet the country only produces enough electricity for one large town. Blackouts last for months. Of the nation's handful of power plants, a mere quarter work. Nearly 90% of the gas required to run them is sold to Shell and Chevron, the revenue used to fuel shopping trips to London and Dubai for the skin bleached mistresses of politicians. In another six years, the government will execute poet Ken Saroia for writing about it. And the 2000 oil spills Shell has yet to clean up. The university students scoff through the graphic choppily added televised procedure. Look at them showing off for what tomorrow same same the campus no get aspirin. Then believe it or not, the pair successfully separated two tiny hearts throbbing with Nigerian sized determination. One soft bloody skull reconstructed into two. Take that Western press. The students let out a great roar and order rounds of drinks Guinness and Coke for those with means local beers star and Goulder for those without Nigerians have skills. No doubt about it. But I will soon learn as the search for my twin and my father will teach me Nigeria is not for the thin skinned nor the faint of heart. Even with 90 million citizens rooting for the Siamese Nigerians, especially we in the southeast, whose limbs and fetuses are countrymen hacked off with machetes during the civil war. We and my father's homeland who support partition of the country, as if the British had never sutured two bleeding bodies together and sent them staggering out into the world, even when all 90 million of us are able to come together to want this one small thing. Shortly after surgery, my birthday twins die. That's when my book starts. Yay. And I have time for a little short thing. Okay. And then this is from meeting faith, my account of having been Thailand's first black Buddhist nun wouldn't have a favorite. One evening I fall asleep meditating. I awake at 9 30 completely disoriented. My hut is dark. My contacts welded to dry eyes and my bladder groans. Groggy and half blind, I stagger outside to the bathroom. Climbing onto a cement block and placing my feet on the grooved foot pads beside the basin. I noticed a scattering of black lines in the toilet bowl. I groan. More dead gnats. Day after day, I clap my palms together over the bowl careful not to disturb the other nuns. I scoop water from a bucket and dribble many waterfalls of warning begging the gnats to fly away so I can pee without committing a sin. I hop from leg to leg mouthing a prayer of increasing intensity. Hurry up, fly away. These gnats who have chosen my toilet are my responsibility, my constant inadvertent sin. Since they're already dead, I suppose it's all right. I wrestle my sarong up over my hips and squat down. Afterwards, I step off the dice and reach for the plastic bowl to ladle water into the basin to flush. As I bend towards the plastic bucket, I hear a whoosh. Spinning around, I see a rat. It's torso nearly eight inches long fly out of the toilet bowl, exactly where I had been squatting only inches before. My groin contracts, the bowl clouters to the floor, a strangled cry escapes my throat. The rat propelling itself out of the narrow mouth of the toilet flies in a liquid glistening arc towards the door it no doubt expects to find open and the great outdoor is beyond. Instead, the door is shut. With a great thwap, it hits the wood full force and goes berserk. Squealing the animal flings itself around the tiny bathroom twisting up down and around. Each time it meets resistance and ricochets faster off the walls, the ceiling, the floor, zoom, zoom, zoom. It flails and shrieks, scattering its foul trail, bare teeth slicing within inches of my hair, my face, my throat, my breasts, my belly, my buttocks, my calves, my ankles. Still crouched over the bucket, I'm paralyzed in the midst of the rat's crazed trajectory. A museum thief caught in a high tech laser web. Even if I had the presence of mind to move out of the way, I have no idea where to go. The rabid rat is moving so quickly, it's everywhere. I hear the crunch of rat muscle and bone against stone walls, tin ceiling, wooden floor. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I know I can't scream that nuns who've taken vows of silence don't go hollering and running around half naked due to small animals. It takes all my concentration to control this novice body in its stiff white sarong that has chosen this of all moments to begin undoing itself. As my skirt slides down my trembling legs, my heart rises so high in my throat it nearly chokes me. I feel a furry whirr against my knees and the bucket flips over leaking water into the cement floor. Liquid dribbles warm along my inner thigh. And I'll leave you with that. Faith Ali, oh my God, thank you for that. Really, I'm sorry that happened to you. But I'm glad you're a writer. You know, that was great. Our next reader here is here from Arizona. It's Breanne Faas. She's an associate professor of women and gender.