I was going through my filing cabinets recently and found a series of letters I got back in the late 1980s from a young woman in Zimbabwe. I’m not sure how she found me, but she wrote to ask me how she could become an astronaut. All her life, she wrote, she loved the stars. She used to go out and make up her own constellations, in addition to the stories her people (the Shona) told about the stars. Once she even sent me several pages of drawings she made of the night sky, the stars all connected with lines to show me her constellations.

I sent her some astronomy books and encouraged her to keep studying science as long as she could. She didn’t have a lot of hope that she’d be allowed to study astronomy since her country needed doctors and computer programmers and more “practical” scientists before it needed astronomers. Eventually we lost track of each other, and in the years since, Zimbabwe has fallen onto very hard times under its current government. So, I don’t know what happened to my friend. I hope that she has been able to persevere and study science, and that she looks out at the stars and still does her astronomy. And, now that I think about her again, I’m going to do a little searching out of Shona and Zimbabwean understanding of the stars and the cosmos.