Togo, 2016: the first trip I took alone
I landed in Lomé with a volunteering placement, a rucksack and about eleven words of French. Eight of them were numbers. The heat arrived before anything else did — thick, red-dust heat that got into the seams of my clothes and stayed there for a month.
For the first two days I said almost nothing. I pointed. I smiled the apologetic smile you learn to make when you are the only person in the room who cannot follow the conversation. It is a lonely way to be somewhere.
Then somebody stopped me on the road and told me, kindly and firmly, that I had forgotten to say good morning. Not as a scolding — as information. In Togo you greet first. You ask about the family, the night, the health of the house. Only then do you ask for the thing you actually came for.
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