Caro arrived in Lagos in the late afternoon and she was exhausted by the long journey, the switching of vehicles and the horrible seating arrangement in the bus. She had almost been squeezed to death between two adult women and had to gain some space by occasionally using her elbows on their ribs. They did not complain, but their glares told of their dislike for her strategy. But she cared less. 

The thought of Lagos had been the thought of something grand and beautiful, but now that she was here, Caro was nothing short of disappointed. The dirt, the traffic gridlock, the crowd of constantly moving people and the noisy touts told a very different story from those she had been told. In fact, she was heading to meet the storyteller and she would ask her why she had deceived her and everyone else in the village, but that would be after she must have managed to extricate the hem of her frock from whatever was holding on to it as she tried to exit the bus. 

"Please wait o!", she shouted frantically, but the driver was already moving ahead, the vehicle slowly picking up speed. The conductor himself was much unconcerned about her plight, instead he was more focused on wooing new passengers. She was lucky that none of her legs had touched the ground yet or she would be dragged on the ground as the vehicle moved. 

With one hand on the side of the bus, she roughly jerked her frock away from the sharp part of the iron seat that it had hooked on to, tearing off a little part of the material in the process. But that was a small price to pay for not missing her bus stop. With a calculated jump, she exited the moving vehicle and managed to hit the ground running. 

"Useless idiots," she cursed, after she had caught her breath, as she inspected the torn part of her dress. Then she lifted it up, fished into the pocket of the little shorts she wore underneath and pulled out the small white paper stored there. She had earlier memorized its contents, but the happenings of the last few minutes were enough to make one forget even his/her name. 

Caro was sure that she was at the right bus stop. There was the street's name up there on a pole - the only good thing she had seen of Lagos so far. But being at the bus stop was still another problem on its own. 

The entire place was one big noisy market. There was an untarred dirt road that led to God knew where, but from her point of view at the bus stop, she could see that the road was not only far from straight, but it also had some branches which people were constantly taking. Joining the throng would be nothing short of madness. She was not in any way familiar with this environment and she could easily get lost. She had to ask for help. But perhaps she needed a little something to spur her on? 

She heard the angry blast of a danfo horn and she jumped out of the way just in time as the driver maneuvered his rickety contraption of a vehicle into a temporary parking spot, throwing curses at her as he went. His conductor had already jumped down and was shouting the locations his bus would reach and go through. Before she could fully recover her composure, she received a sharp push from a middle-aged man whose path she had been blocking. In fact, she was still blocking the path of many other people. The solution was to keep moving and keep her eyes and ears open. 

At first, she stood still to allow people pass before moving on, but after several pushes from the back and sides, she finally learned to move like everyone else in the throng. When she eventually reached the roasted plantain seller a few metres away, she had spent about half an hour, a journey that would take any other person in the area only a few seconds. But in that half hour, she had learnt what would have taken some people at least a day to learn. She was from a crazy environment herself, the biggest difference was in the population and the density, but adjusting was not going to be much of a problem. 

"Good afternoon, ma," she greeted the woman selling the roasted plantain, groundnuts and a few other items like soft drinks in a cooler. 

"Kil'efe {*what do you want*}?", the woman asked, vigorously fanning the hot coals she was using for her roasting. 

"Eh?", Caro blurted in total lack of comprehension. 

"What you wan buy?", the woman repeated in broken English. 

"Oh. I don't want to buy anything. I just want to find out where this place is." Caro hurriedly unfolded her little white paper containing the address of her mother's cousin preparatory to showing it to the woman. But the plantain seller, seeing that the girl had no intention whatsoever to buy anything from her, promptly hissed and turned away. 

"Tunde!", she called at the top of her lungs. "Tunde!", she called again. And still, no response. "Lo pe egbon e wa {*go call your elder brother*}," she said to a little chubby calabash-bellied child seated on the ground beside her. "Sare sare {*hurry hurry*}." 

Caro watched as the child darted off on the errand, hoping that the woman had some intention of helping her, but the look she received when the woman finally looked her way left her in no doubt that she had to try somewhere else. Tunde was obviously being called for a reason that had nothing to do with her situation.