Adisa noticed the changes one at a time.

First came the men from the West.

They arrived with trucks, tools, medicine, clothes, and plans. They said they could make life easier for everyone. They were polite. They shook hands. They smiled a lot.

Adisa was one of the first people in the village to speak with them. He helped translate. He showed them where to find water. When they needed someone to explain something to the elders, they came to him.

At first, nobody seemed to mind.

The medicine helped.

The tools made some work easier.

Then the building started.

A road was cut through the village. Concrete buildings went up where there had been open ground. Machines replaced work that people had always done by hand. The men installed electric lights, and for the first time the village stayed awake after dark.

People liked the lights.

The children especially.

They would stand underneath them at night, looking up and laughing. There was something exciting about having electricity. Something new.

Adisa liked it too.

That was what bothered him.

He couldn't point to a single moment when things had gone wrong because, for a long time, nothing seemed wrong.

His family had medicine now. The road made it easier to travel. Some of the younger people found jobs with the newcomers.

But other things started disappearing.

The old gathering places weren't used as much. The younger people stopped coming when the elders told stories. The old songs were being sung less often.

Nobody announced that these things were over.

They simply happened less.

One evening, Adisa sat with several of the elders while they talked about the village before the road came through.

They talked about the land, the animals, the places where people used to gather.

One of the elders pointed toward the far side of the village.

"There," he said.

Adisa looked.

There was a new building there.

The elder smiled and told him what had once stood in its place.

Adisa remembered it.

He remembered sitting there as a boy.

He remembered his father sitting beside him.

He had forgotten about that until now.

The conversation moved on.

Adisa stayed quiet.

He thought about how easily something could disappear. No ceremony. No announcement. One day it was there. Then someone built something else on top of it, and eventually you had to think hard to remember what had been there before.

That night, Adisa walked beyond the edge of the village.

The new lights followed him farther than they used to.

Behind him, music played from one of the houses. A machine ran somewhere in the distance.

He looked up.

The sky seemed smaller.

There were still stars, but not as many as he remembered.

When he was a boy, his father had shown him the constellations. His father knew their names. He knew when they appeared and where to look for them.

Adisa had never bothered to learn them.

There had always been tomorrow.

He stood there trying to find one of them.

He couldn't.

Behind him, the village was brighter than it had ever been.

In front of him, the sky was darker than he remembered.

Adisa stayed where he was.

For the first time, he understood that losing something doesn't always feel like loss when it happens.

Sometimes it feels like progress.

And sometimes you don't realize what you've traded away until you go looking for it and can't remember where to find it.

This is Adisa's story. He is the subject of this drawing. The drawing is graphite, charcoal and ink on paper.