William, as he introduced himself, was tall and handsome, and his hair had a slight red tint to it as if it were burnt around the edges. I guessed he was maybe a year older than me, although it was hard to tell because all the Namibian students wore the same uniform, a polo shirt and khaki pants.

“You’re from the United States!” he announced upon sitting down. “New York or Los Angeles?”

“Chicago,” I said. Now on my third week in Africa, I had learned this could not pass without some explanation. “It’s in the middle of the country.”

It was the kind of school field trip that seemed perfectly natural during the boom years of the late '90s. My cohort of 15 high schoolers had traveled through South Africa, Mozambique and Swaziland. Namibia’s dusty capital, Windhoek, was our final stop — and on this, the second-to-last day of the trip, our group leader launched a last-ditch effort to get us to actually interact with African people, by offering the students of a local school seats on our bus for a lift across the city.

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