roadnme

 Senegal, South Africa Image source Have you seen Taken? Well if you have then you’d know why I didn’t choose Europe for my social internship. I choose South Africa. This wasn’t a pleasure trip I wanted to add to my CV, so I took up a rural upliftment assignment in Africa, that required me to help kids and the villages. Well, a lot of people asked me, ‘Why not help in India?’. But, this was my chance to escape. I packed my shorts, a bikini for my summer time chilling and lots of dresses for night outs in the main city. I got of the airport, waiting for a chauffeur driven car, what I got instead, was a reality check. Me and other 5 volunteers sat in the back of a jeep and drove to a place called Senegal. I used my expensive dresses as a floor mat to sleep in huts with families of local villagers, my shorts were drenched in sweat after a days work, my bikinis became underwear when I ran out of clean ones. I did meet a man, his name was Akua, he would smile at me each time he

‘One ticket to Paris please’, 5 words I never thought I’d hear myself say again. I was 16 when I associated Paris with love. Yes, you can blame the media, you can blame the internet, but I thank them. I discussed running away to Paris with my boyfriend of 6 years. He’d always say, ‘We’ll go for our honeymoon when we get married’. Somewhere that bothered me. I felt strangled, I wanted to live and he was holding me back. I knew this had to end, but who has the guts to end such a long relationship? Apparently he did. I found him in bed with a girl who has to me was a faceless, nameless catalyst. I didn’t cry, I cleared my bank account, took my bags and headed to the airport. It’s not like the movies, I didn’t land and feel pure joy. It was way more real. I found my own way to my dingy hotel room, I booked my own tours, I decided where I went and what I did. I stood under the Eiffel Tour and took a picture of me, not me and an imaginary him kissing, like every postcard told me,

We arrived more than two hours later than planned, but the west of England summer light had not yet faded even to dusk. A soft golden glow was just growing across the sunset, which had just tinged a flat-calm sea beyond this tumbling village. We were tourists here, strangers in this small, tightly-knit place. For us it was just part of a tour, a long weekend snatched in common from the clutches of our combined, ever demanding careers. I felt utterly liberated, that beautiful evening, as we walked the quarter mile or so down the steep dry cobbles from the obligatory car park into the car-less village, the deadlines and demands of advertising for once confined outside the limits of this small place. And I could tell from the spring in Jenny's step that her battles with bottom sets in Lewisham were now further distant than our three days on the road. There was a small gift shop, a tourist-trap trinket place, just a hundred yards along the lane. I bought the newspaper our early depa