Abéné —
jungle, sea, and the people
who gave me their time

Abéné is not easy to describe to someone who hasn't been there. It's a beach. It's also a jungle. The two don't negotiate — they simply coexist, palms leaning over the sand, roots threading through soil that feels ancient and alive at the same time. You hear the ocean and the birds at the same time. You smell salt and earth at the same time. It doesn't feel like a place that's trying to be anything. It just is.

I spent six and a half weeks there with my partner Dom. We arrived not knowing anyone.

We left with brothers and sisters. And three dogs.

This was not a vacation

I want to be clear about that. We weren't passing through. We weren't ticking off excursions or lying on resort sun beds. We were just living. Showing up. Moving through the days the way people there do — slowly, with time for each other, without a schedule that couldn't be interrupted.

Every morning I had tea with my neighbor Lamin — who runs New Happy Corner lodge just nearby and Happy Corner in the town center. Sometimes Dom was there. Sometimes it was just Lamin and me, and that was its own thing. He would make cashew juice for me, burn fresh cashew over fire. Small things that weren't small at all. By noon my phone would ring — come over, food is ready. That was my life in Abéné. Not tourism. Just life.

Lamin — New Happy Corner, Abéné

2 AM and Kim Baba

The very first night, walking past Jazz Café at 2 in the morning, someone called out to us.

Kim Baba.

He just saw us pass and that was enough. Come, sit. We smoked a joint and talked, and somewhere in the conversation it came out that he knew our friend from Kartong. Of course he did. That's Abéné. An absolute nutter — in the very best possible sense — warm and gentle and so funny, and underneath all of it, genuinely wise in a way that doesn't announce itself. It just comes out quietly in the way he sees things, the way he speaks about people, the way he treated two strangers at 2 AM like they were already part of the circle.

We were, apparently. We just didn't know it yet.

Kim Baba (tie dye), Dom, and Manoman — one of those afternoons that just happened

The beignet and Sal

A few weeks in, I was walking through the town center when I saw a woman coming down the road carrying something on her head. I do this everywhere — if a woman is selling something, I stop and I buy. These women deserve it. So I called her over.

She was selling beignet — a sweet, soft donut, still warm. I squatted down on the side of the dusty road and started eating, and while I had my mouth completely full someone approached me. My first instinct — mouth full of donut, no filter — was: do you want some?

I looked up and saw his eyes just brighten.

He said: I don't know you, but you already speak African to me.

Of course he wanted some. We sat there together on the side of the road eating beignet, and just like that we were friends. We went to his place after. His name was Sal — and it turned out he was Lamin's brother. Of course he was.

Dom and Sal at his place — Dom wearing a tunic from Papi's shop

Dom in the shirt he bought from Sal — wearing Abéné home

Papi

That same stretch of town gave me another one. Pa-peace — Papi — who had a little place full of beautiful things and a heart even fuller. Dom and I were just walking past one day when he called us over and offered us tea. Just like that. Come in, sit, have tea. We ended up staying, finding all these wonderful things at his place, talking, laughing. He was sweet in the way that some people just are — naturally, without trying.

And yes, he turned out to be one of the brothers too. Of course he did. By this point I had stopped being surprised.

Papi outside his shop in Abéné — where we found beautiful things and stayed much longer than planned

Afternoons in the shade at New Happy Corner — Juliana, Dom and me

Paba

Then there was Paba — the heart of Happy Corner. If Lamin holds the place together, Paba feeds it. An amazing cook, warm and generous, always in the middle of everything in the best possible way. Food at Happy Corner tasted like someone had put real love into it, and that someone was usually Paba.

Paba (sunglasses), Lamin and Dom — lunch, sand, one uninvited dog

Manoman

And then there was Manoman — another brother, another face from Lamin's circle that I kept running into. One evening I found him at a chicken shop. I paid for his dinner without thinking twice. It's a dollar meal. He looked at me with this expression I couldn't quite read at first — somewhere between surprise and something softer than that.

I like to share. That's all. When you have something and someone is there, you share. It shouldn't be remarkable. But maybe that's the point — that in some places, it still is.

Mouna

Lamin introduced me to Mouna. She was loud — wonderfully, unapologetically loud — and she had this true African beauty about her that she carried completely unaware of itself. Her heart was pure and her skin was flawless and she had no idea. And she could cook. Properly cook — the kind of food that makes you close your eyes on the first bite. I kept running into her, just like everyone else in Abéné — on the side of the road, in the town center, at New Happy Corner by the beach. Always by chance. Always like it was meant.

Mouna at New Happy Corner beach, and with me and Juliana — an Italian woman who made Abéné her home

Lamin, Paba, Kim Baba, Mouna and me — the circle

The Bayefall

I had seen Muslim women in Indonesia — navigating faith, covering themselves, finding their own quiet negotiations between tradition and freedom. I had watched women in West African villages carry everything: the water, the children, the weight of the household, while the men rested in the shade. I had formed pictures in my head, assumptions about what Islam looks like in practice, what it does to women, what it does to communities.

Then I met the Bayefall and those pictures got complicated.

The Bayefall are a Sufi brotherhood — a branch of the Mouride order — rooted in Senegal and The Gambia. They are Muslim, but they move through the world differently than any Muslim community I had encountered before. They dress in patchwork colors, wear dreadlocks, work with their hands, and believe that honest labor and devotion to your spiritual guide is itself a form of prayer. They don't always fast during Ramadan. They don't always follow the rules that other Muslim communities follow strictly. What they do instead is serve. They give. They work. They show up.

There is a radical generosity in the Bayefall that I have rarely seen anywhere. Not the generosity of people who have extra and choose to share it. The generosity of people who have barely enough and share anyway — because that's just what you do.

The women here moved differently too. Not the quiet endurance I had seen elsewhere. Something freer. Something that didn't fit the picture I had arrived with. I'm still thinking about why.

Lunch

We barely spent money on lunch for six and a half weeks.

Not because we were careful with money. Because people kept inviting us in.

Someone I had met twice would appear at midday: come, eat with us. A family we had shared tea with once would call us over when the rice was ready. It was never a big gesture. It was just — of course, sit down, here is food, you are here so you eat with us.

I thought about this a lot. About what it means to give from a place of having very little. About how in wealthier places, generosity is often conditional — the right occasion, the right amount, the right relationship. Here it was simply unconditional. You are present, so you are welcome.

The way lunch worked — someone would call, you'd come, you'd eat together from the same plate

Abéné the dog

In the second week we found a puppy — abandoned, tiny, alone. We took her in and looked after her for five weeks. We called her Abéné, after the place that gave her to us. When we left, she came with us to Kartong, to a friend who would keep her and love her.

Then two more dogs came. Not strays exactly — they just appeared one day and decided to stay. They chose us. That's the only way to describe it. They walked themselves over and that was that. I think about that sometimes — what it means to be chosen by something that has no reason to trust you and trusts you anyway.

Morning practice — they always found their way onto the mat

Even lunch wasn't without the dogs

Yafatou

The first time I saw her — Yafatou, who worked at the place where we were staying — she didn't say hello from a distance or wait to be introduced. She ran straight to me and gave me a hug. We'd had a difficult journey, problems with a pickup at the border crossing, the whole thing a mess, and all she cared about was: are you okay?

That was Yafatou.

Smart, beautiful, and the most quietly caring person I met in all those weeks. I taught her yoga. She taught me love. That's not a small thing to say — I mean it exactly as it sounds. There are people who show you something about how to be human that you didn't know you were missing. Yafatou was one of those people. A blessing, a pretty soul, and a friendship I will carry long after the tan fades and the road moves on.

Walking with Yafatou under the baobabs

The goodbye

When the time came to leave, I organised a dinner. A bonfire at New Happy Corner. A last evening together.

I didn't know how many people would come.

So many people came.

Dom and I looked around that fire and I didn't fully understand it at first — why were all these people here, on a weeknight, taking time out of their lives? And then it landed: they came because they wanted to. Because in Abéné, when someone matters to you, you make time. You show up. You sit around the fire.

I didn't realise until that moment that all these people — Kim Baba from a 2 AM jazz café, Lamin from morning tea and cashew juice, Sal from a dusty roadside donut, Papi from a cup of tea and a doorway, Manoman from a chicken shop, Mouna who kept appearing like she was meant to, Yafatou who ran to hug me before she even knew me — were our people. The same circle, gathered in one place, for us.

Part of the goodbye dinner at New Happy Corner — this was just who was in the frame. So many more came that night

All the physical stuff will fade and tear. But time is memory. That's the only thing we actually keep.