My first day in the Gambia starts the same way as my last first day in the Gambia: a few kilometers from the border, I get a flat tire.

The rain gathers overhead. I stop and tear everything apart under the roof outside of a small shop. Four teenage boys gather around me. They crouch next to me and watch, with their lanky knees coming up to their chins.
“We saw you last time,” the tallest kid says. “You and your bike, when you walked past. Will you come into my compound for lunch? It’s just here,” he points. “My mom is making supukanye.”

The sweethearts; I smile and scrape the tube. It’s been three months since last time, and I am amazed that they can remember me. Then again, there are probably not too many white people leading their punctured bikes along this road.

It is the tube in the carriage that has exploded, a tear about ten centimeters going along the rubber seam. After two failed tries on my part, the boys jump on the opportunity to help. Some of them are apprentices for the local vulcanisateurs. They bicker about the right way to do it and who will be the one to take my saw blade and grate the rubber, smear on glue from the can and knock the patch into place with the wrench. Their devotion aches my heart.

Cars and people pass us by on the road. They all greet, but it is only Abu who comes down to investigate the matter. He is thin, his pants and t-shirt worn, his beanie bulging with short dreads. He is carrying a bag of groceries and comes to crouch down next to us. His voice is low, slow and calm.
“How is it going?” he asks. He takes the sorry tube from the boys, runs his fingers along the tear. He stays quiet and thoughtful. I notice that he hasn’t called me toubab like everyone else, and I point it out.
“We are all human. Black and white are only colors,” he replies.
“Let me try,” he adds, and goes to work scraping the glue off the tube again.

After two more failed tries Abu takes me to the market while the boys watch my bike and my stuff. Coming back, it takes me ten minutes to repair the bike and have everything back in order.
“Come to my house, we’ll have some lunch,” Abu says, and I have no reason not to follow him. The boys wave us off.

We walk until the next village. The sky stays gray and a few drops fall. The front of Abu’s house is overgrown, grass with small flowers reaching higher than us. The house is big behind the grass: several rooms in a row. I look into them through the missing windows and doors. The roof has collapsed and the concrete is raw and withering. Grass and bushes push through inside and the porch is falling apart; no one has lived here for years.

Abu’s single room is its own building by the side of the big house. He makes space to sit on the porch, a thin meter away from the wall with the disintegrating plaster. A strip of metal roof protects us from the drizzle. I lean my bike against the wall and hang my rain jacket on the clothesline above.
“Did you grow up here?” I ask Abu. He nods.
“This used to be my father’s house. My parents are dead now, my siblings are gone. I am the only one left.”
“And you don’t have a wife, children?” It’s really unusual for people in the Gambia to be all alone.
“No, no one.” He knocks ashes out of a small stove and sets an ataya-kettle to boil. He brings out a dish and lifts the lid: rice and fish sauce prepared and brought to him by his neighbor. He might live alone, but in Africa no one is ever truly alone; the community closes in like a safety net. We eat, Abu pours the sweet tea and I look at the two hens and a handful of fluffy chicks making eager tours around our feet. A cat rolls his tail nearby.
“She is the daughter of the white one,” Abu points to the smaller, black hen. “And it’s actually her chicks. But she has rejected them, so it’s the grandmother who takes care of them all.” They seem to know him well; they hurry off to the feeder in the corner the moment Abu stands up with the leftovers. While the rice grains disappear into eager picky-beaks, he turns to me.
”Do you want to see my garden?”

Lush leaves fall over the wonky sheet metal gate. He lifts the latch, then presses his body close to the wall to let me pass ahead. The hens and chicks rush past beneath my feet and begin scratching the ground, chattering.

The plot of land is wide, maybe forty meters across, all surrounded by a brick wall and lined by tall mango trees. Water drops down from the leaves.
”Watch out,” Abu says. A deep hole opens in the sand to the right; his well has collapsed during the last heavy downpour.

Evenly spaced cassava plants with their sparse leaves grow taller than me, deep green maize reach for the sky, and small, sturdy hibiscus plants poke up here and there. To the right is another big mango tree with a vigorous passion fruit climbing and tangling several meters up into the foliage. It is the same passion fruit whose leaves are pushing over the wall, bright green; shiny and perfectly round fruit hide and ripen among the leaves.
”The children love that one,” Abu says. He looks around for fallen fruit and pockets two for later on.

A few tools are scattered on the ground which is meticulously cleaned from weeds. Abu brings me around to show the winding pumpkins and watermelons further in, crouches down and turns the bright yellow pumpkin flowers up for me to see. I will ask to sleep here tonight, I think to myself. Abu has told me that he works as a metal-bender at construction sites. His job is to shape the iron rods used to reinforce the concrete, but work is hard to find and for the moment there is none.
“Do you sell what you grow?” I ask.
“No, it’s way too little. I eat it myself and give to my neighbors.”

We go back to sit on the porch and look at the wall. The mother-hen spreads her wings and the chicks run to huddle around her belly. She arranges her feathers until her wings cover every last one as they take their afternoon nap. Then she nods off too, eyes closing and head bobbing. Abu serves more ataya, cuts me one of the passion fruits and rolls a joint. People pass and look at us from the road, eyes stuck on me, the white stranger. They yell greetings and lift their hands; yell ”toubab”. A group of barefoot children thunders by, crowding around Abu. They leave clutching passion fruits. A few visitors come to smoke, drink ataya and ask where I’m from. The day passes.

Abu, of course, agrees to let me sleep in his garden.

…

I buy us bread for breakfast the next day: the good kind they make here in the Gambia, the one made in a stone oven and called tapalapa. The sky is still low and grey. We stay sitting on the porch while visitors keep coming to drink tea and roll. I don’t follow the conversation in the local languages, say no to both the tea and the weed, but enjoy to hang out nonetheless. It is a good rest from the cycling.

Across the road, a friend of Abu’s is making charcoal. It takes a week, I learn; a huge fire is built under a mound of sand; oxygen-starved combustion. The fire guard needs to always stay by the fire, and indeed Abu’s friend has been sleeping next to the pile of sand. His clothes speak of it.
”It it hard work!” I exclaim as I learn of the process. Just standing a few meters away from the pile makes me sweat from the heat. Abu’s friend smiles grimly.
”It is, yes.” He is just opening up the smoking pile, standing on the mound, sweat pouring as he shovels the sand away and tosses the black chunks of coal to the side. The women bring him water from the well and he sprinkles it on the chunks so that they sizzle.

…

We visit more of Abu’s friends in the next village. As always, people turn their heads toward me and children gather by the walls to look and shout ”toubab”. I am used to it and so I don’t react, but I see Abu turn his head each time, a little tension taking hold of his shoulders. He smiles at me, apologetic.
“It’s always like that, don’t worry,” I smile. He turns his eyes ahead.
”Black or white, it makes no difference,” he says.

The compound is big, with an intricate iron gate. The house is tiled on the outside. Inside are faux-leather couches, heavy curtains, a big TV and a Western style kitchen with wall cabinets, a table and chairs (though I later learn that they cook in the back room with raw concrete walls and a gas tube). As we enter, the youngest kid runs up and jumps into Abu’s arms. Abu lifts him up and kisses him. He greets all the kids as they gather around, ruffles their heads and jokes softly with them. The kids are more shy toward me.
“Go on, go greet the toubab,” the auntie and the mother urge, smiling, and reluctantly they come. The women beam at me. We stay and chat, get fed rice with chicken mafé. The house is so different from Abu’s cramped, single room, but he moves about with ease.
”It’s like my family,” he explains. ”The father in this house is like my brother, we grew up together.” From the way the children cling to him, I can see that.

…

“You like tapalapa, right?” Abu asks. It is night and we’re sitting on his porch, the ataya-kettle boiling over an orange glow. I’ve hung my headlight as a lamp on the clothesline above us, the single sharp light turning us into interesting monochrome shapes.
“I love tapalapa,” I say.
“We can go and get some now, if you want. They have a bakery in the next village. They start to work at night.”

Abu’s phone shines a small circle of light on the road below his feet, swinging back and forth with his arm. Apart from that and the few passing cars, the road is completely black. We pass a few orange-glowing charcoal fires by the road and an occasional group of people with their own moving lights.
“Oh, toubab,” they mumble as they pass.

Suddenly we hear raised voices. I hesitate. A group of older teenage boys are standing in the middle of the road, arguing. They don’t have any lights and I can barely make them out. Two seem to be confronting each other, arms stretched, ready to grab, push, punch. Others surround them. I tense. I don’t like to be around shouting men, but I really want them to at least not fight on the open road in this dark. The cars coming are fast.
”What should we-” I start, but Abu is already heading towards them. His flashlight pointed down, he does not hurry or change his pace. He simply steps in between the boys, his small thin body still between their long flailing arms and shouts. His voice is a quiet mumble as he talks to them. And in a moment the boys back off. They lower their arms, get down from the road and disappear into the dark, quiet but for a few scoffs.
”It’s the hormones,” Abu remarks when he joins me. I say nothing, amazed at how quickly and smoothly he broke up the fight. Did they listen because he is their elder?
”What was it about?” I ask. I imagine hearing him shrug.
”I don’t know.”

We turn off the road and follow a few narrow paths; I can already smell the bread. We reach a sand square lit yellow by a single street light, black cables running up and down and spreading in all directions. A few people sit outside one of the houses, chattering, laughing. Smoke is rising from the chimney.

They greet Abu like a brother and everyone exclaims as they spot me. We are let into the bakery, a small, hot room dimly lit with an electric lamp on one of the walls. Flashlights dart. A glowing red mouth opens from the stone oven that takes up half the room. Four men are sweating, moving; two by a big counter filled with dough balls that they knead, roll out and pass on. A third one lays the rolls one by one on a long piece of cloth, folding the cloth into an edge between each roll. The fourth tends the fire roaring in the oven. The radio is on, the men chatter and joke and I ask if I can film them. They let me. They try to pronounce the name of my country, joke about marrying me and finally send us away with smiles and steaming lengths of bread. Back home Abu makes ataya.

…

I wake up from the thump of a passion fruit next to my tent. A few drops fall around me, a rooster crows. The leaves rustle in a breath of breeze. I crawl out of the tent, into the garden, stretch and take in the fresh air.

”Do you really have to go?” Abu asks me. It is midday. In truth, I don’t have to do anything. I haven’t set a time, but someone is waiting for me in Gunjur.
”We will keep in touch,” I say. We have talked about everything our language barrier allows us to, most time being dedicated to mutual silence and breathing peaceful air.
”Let’s take a photo together, by the house,” Abu suggests. We arrange ourselves on the porch with the withered walls as a backdrop. I smile, even though I don’t like to be in photos, but Abu looks sad.
”When will you come back?” he asks.
”I don’t know,” I say. I have a feeling he would let me stay forever if I wanted.

We go over to his neighbors’ one last time, chat and play with the children. They bring me books to read for them in English and show off their knowledge of the Arab alphabet. They bring me the green, potato-y fruits with the brown egg-like skins and I pack them into my carriage. They follow me to the road, watch as I struggle the bike through the gate.

A car passes and suddenly the girl next to me yells out.
”Tooou-baaab!” I look down at her. Her eyes follow the car.
”Hey,” I say, click my tongue and shake my head. She looks up at me, eyes wide and innocent. It’s like a knee-jerk or a sneeze; they can’t help but yell at a white person as soon as they see one.

I wave good-bye and shake every hand, pat every head. Lastly I press Abu’s hand with my own two.
”Thank you so, so much,” I say into his eyes.
”We are all the same,” he replies.

I roll along and think about the baby chicks under their mama’s wings and the raindrops hanging on the mango leaves. The rooms where Abu and his siblings slept as kids but which are withering and overgrown now; how he is so quiet, yet does not have to speak for his loving heart because his thriving garden, his happy chickens and the children running up for hugs do so for him.

At least he’s not alone, I think, with friends and neighbors paying visits and bringing food. It is amazing that there are people who take in strangers and offer everything, without asking anything. My heart aches. Hopefully his eyes won’t stay sad forever.

…

Writing this almost six months later, and Abu will still send a fairly regular, occasional hello, asking me where I am, what the weather is like and whether I’ve had tapalapa. He always tells me he is fine and I always hope that it is true. I wish the world had more people like him; simple and calm, unquestioningly kind and endlessly patient. May he be blessed.

…

(This story told in pictures and video.)