One evening in Ethiopia, Gebi Egato turned from his thatch-roofed hut and went to look for his donkey.
It was twilight, and the sounds of children settling for sleep murmured from one neighboring hut after another. Egato, his voice firm and full of love, called out for the donkey. The young animal was somewhere in the tight twists of brush surrounding the hilltop, but so too were hyenas.
Walking with Egato, I joined his call, using the Oromigna word I'd heard him use: "haree . . . haree."
Egato and I were young fathers who had met only days before. We appeared to have little else in common, neither nationality, nor race, nor language; not religion, nor culture, nor cuisine.
Yet with the day's dry heat broken and the wind-blown dust settled, our unexpected stroll found the rhythm of friendship. In that fold of earth so distant from my origins, I felt at home.
Home is an intensely personal intersection of geography and experience. During these past seven years, as I have wandered the world as travel writer for The Globe, I have sought above all else the intimacy that comes when meeting another person in his or her place.
Often, I arrived to talk about something far from individual: politics or architecture, for example, history or religion. In Russia, Egypt, Brazil, and dozens of other countries so far from my home, I was time and again welcomed into another.
In eastern Turkey, I sat in a living room with more than a dozen men, elders of the village of Tuzla. They had fled with their families from that fertile farm town years before, when battle between the Turkish Army and Kurdish rebels set homes aflame. On the day of my visit, the men took seats on soft pillows in a rebuilt house to consider the marriage proposal of Garip Kan, 22, who had returned from the city of Diyarbakir. Talk turned from their home toward mine: Did I have children? How old?
In Cambodia, as rain fell harder than the black of night, Sim Saem, a young mother, slept on a bed warmed by glowing coals. Her one-day-old daughter, still without a name, slept at Saem's side. I listened as neighbors chatted on the floor of the stilted hut. Some slipped small sums into the baby's silk mittens to ease her arrival into this world.
In India, Lalita Ramen stood with family in a field of cotton near the Arabian Sea. She pulled a pink shawl tight across her arms as a procession of politicians passed along a dirt road to honor the legacy of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Seventy-five years earlier, Gandhi had traveled the same road as part of his nonviolent movement for Indian independence from Britain.
"The road is difficult to walk on," Ramen told me. "They've walked on it one day. Imagine walking on it every day."
