“There’s no way she’s going to get it in”. He was confident.

Both of us, along with a newly befriended seatmate were waging as a middle-aged Nigerian woman kept shoving and wedging a square shaped piece of luggage into the narrow, rectangular overhead bin.

“Trust me, it will enter”, our new lady friend from Benin was certain.

“Absolutely no way….. No?! What?”  As if performing a magic trick, it miraculously fit. I beamed proudly at her triumph. Disbelief washed over him and I knew he was in for quite the ride in Nigeria.

Seat belts snapped open before we’d even taxied off the runway.  As we taxied past airline carcasses of the defunct Nigerian Airways, I glanced over to observe his disposition.

Upon arrival, Lagos so violently assaults all five senses that the unprepared are usually left visibly shaken and in shock.

****

The sheer volume of people per square foot instantly overwhelms. With 140 million residents in a land area a little smaller than Texas, between 15 to 23 million are rumored to call Lagos home. A couple million too many.

In the three hours it took us to travel roughly 60 km home, we’d seen at least a million people (toddlers alike) dart through traffic while drivers honked impatiently. And the motorcycles (“okadas”) or just plain old mosquitoes as my dad calls them whizzed between cars, thumping on your car trunk or bonnet if you didn’t let them squeeze through.

“There’s so much chaos”, he notes. “But somehow it works. It just seems to work and I don’t get it!”

A quick 10-day jaunt to Nigeria for a couple family celebrations saw us traversing the megacity of Lagos and neighboring states in a tiring feat while making sure I introduced him to authentic Nigerian culture and cuisine along the way.

From hand-sized black snails to roasted goat meat, he downed it all with Viking valor. A quick trip to the tailor, and three days later, he was modeling his own custom made Ankara attires.

After a couple power outages, he was yelling “NEPA!*” alongside the rest of us. Lagom aside for 10 days, booming and excitable voices became the norm and his pitch grew louder.

He also fell in love with Esther. We went to visit and spend some time at Mercy Home. Visions of adoption kept swirling through his mind once he laid eyes on the four year old.

Within days, he’d begun to morph into one of thousands of expatriates that just can’t seem to leave Nigeria behind and frankly, don’t want to.

Stopping over at the famous Fela Kuti shrine for interviews rounded up a visually stimulating trip. You could feel the utter reverence his loyalists shared for “Baba” as they showed us around the grounds. I got to chat briefly with Yeni Kuti, one of his daughters. We’d planned on meeting with Femi Kuti for an interview, but he couldn’t make it due to illness.

 “What are you doing?” I find him scribbling away on a small piece of paper one lazy afternoon.

“Oooh, just compiling an A to Z of Lagos....G for Goat Meat.....H for Humidity....S for Serious Faces....T for Traffic Jams......”

Lagos had charmed him like I knew she would.

* NEPA – The former National Electric Power Authority (NEPA) is now called PHCN which Nigerians fondly interpret as “Problem Has Changed Name!”