What connects a short time together in Berlin in 1982 to a night on a donkey track near the Nigerian border — and to a friendship rediscovered 27 years later?

In this episode of Notes from Between Worlds, I return to Niger and to some of the people and moments that have stayed with me for more than forty years.

There is Mohammed, my friend and assistant, who had very definite ideas about who the passenger-side mirror belonged to. There is malaria, a broken Lada Niva and an improvised repair with a plastic bottle. A village meeting ends with a guinea fowl that refuses to become a gift — and a journey home in an old Land Rover takes an unexpected turn at the edge of a field of floating rice.

Some memories remain because they changed us. Others because, even decades later, they still make us smile.

A ...