Away from home and enticingly out-of-context, travelers often find love they couldn’t access in the routine of their lives. Sometimes that love is erotic. Sometimes it’s a love of love itself, as Alexis Wolff discovered in a lovely essay about Niger in The New York Times’s Modern Love column.

A college student doing a semester abroad in the West African country of Niger, Wolff became enamored of a 2-year-old girl named Bouchara. Like most people in impoverished Niger, the child was desperately poor—her teeth were so rotted “they looked like jagged chips of yellowed ivory jammed into her gums.” She was distrustful of Wolff, an anasara ("white person” in Djerma, the local language). But that didn’t stop Wolff, a young privileged woman at a prestigious college in Connecticut, from spending much of her free time with Bouchara and her family and the village’s children. “In this place described by journalists as one of the most wretched on earth, I felt somehow happier and more childlike than I ever had,” she wrote.

Wolff wanted to replace an emptiness in her heart that came from the unraveling of her own family, which had broken up due to substance abuse. She imagined taking Bouchara back with her to the U.S. and maybe leaving college to start a life as the mother of an adopted Nigerois child. But as the time neared for her to leave, she realized that Bouchara, though poor, already had a caring and intact family who lavished her with love.

Before she left, she made Bouchara a swing out a tire. As Wolff pushed Bouchara and the other children on the new swing, she became so carried away with pretending “that I was a kid, this was my family, this was my life that once I pushed the swing and my arm stopped in front of my face, I was shocked by its whiteness, shocked to remember that this life wasn’t mine, much as I felt it was and wanted it to be.”

Related on World Hum:
* Sandbags in the Archipelago
* ‘The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa’

Photo by katmere, via Flickr (Creative Commons)