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.

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.