Togo, 2016: the first trip I took alone
So I learned to greet. Bonjour, then a pause, then the rest. It took ten seconds and it changed everything about how the day went. The same woman at the same stall gave me a different price and a much longer answer once I stopped opening with a demand.
By the second week I had collected maybe forty words, most of them badly spelled in my notebook. Forty words is not a language. But forty words is enough to be treated as someone who is trying, and being someone who is trying turns out to be a completely different social category from being a tourist.
The night before I flew home, someone taught me akpe — thank you, in Ewe. I said it to the man selling bread at the corner and he laughed out loud and repeated it back twice. That laugh is why I kept travelling. It is also, if I am honest, why I ended up teaching.
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