The whole village bathes at the river together, and there’s a system. You use a dipper to pour water over yourself. You soap up away from the water so the soap never touches the water everyone else is using. Then you use one basin of clean water to rinse your body and another to rinse your hands so you don’t contaminate anyone else’s things.

Nobody explained any of this to me. I tried to watch and copy, I did it completely wrong, and I got scolded more than once. Picture a six-foot-tall Black man in a tiny village in the middle of the rainforest, getting corrected on how to take a bath. I have never felt more like an outsider.

But I’m always respectful, and I embraced the discomfort. That’s the first lesson I can give you: you will be uncomfortable, and you will look foolish sometimes. Stay humble and keep learning.

Her family was always sweet to me. But they didn’t know me, and they worried about their daughter. At one point her mother actually tried to set Mia up on blind dates, to find her someone more serious. They had a picture in their heads of what foreigners are like, from TV and from what they’d heard.