Earlier this year, I went to The Bahamas.
I came home with a question.
It did not emerge during a conference, a formal interview or a carefully planned exchange. It came through two ordinary encounters: a taxi ride and a conversation with a vendor on the beach.
The taxi ride was supposed to last about twenty minutes. I remember almost nothing about the route now, but I remember the driver.
He was Haitian and living in The Bahamas. Somewhere between where I got into the car and where he dropped me off, we began talking about migration, belonging and what it means to make a life between islands.
I wish I had recorded the conversation. At the time, I had no reason to think I would need to. I was simply listening.
Perhaps that is why it stayed with me. There was no prepared question and no pressure to arrive at a lesson. It was just one person telling another something about his life.
As he spoke, I found myself thinking about the word home.
Is home the place that formed you? Is it the place where you now work, raise a family and build a future? Can it be both? What happens when your memories belong to one island and your daily life belongs to another?
The Caribbean is full of movement. We leave for work, education, safety, opportunity and love. Sometimes we cross oceans. Sometimes we move only a few islands away. The distance may look small on a map, but belonging is not measured in miles.
I left the taxi thinking about all the stories being carried quietly through the region. Stories of leaving, arriving, adjusting and beginning again. Stories we may never hear because we see only the driver, the cleaner, the vendor, the worker or the person providing a service.
Later, on the beach, I met a vendor.
Again, the conversation began naturally. I had not gone looking for a story. But as we spoke, I became curious about the woman behind the transaction.
Visitors often experience a beach as a place of escape. For her, it was also a place of work. She had to understand people quickly. She had to read interest, hesitation and mood. She had to know when to speak, when to step back and how to make a living in an economy built partly around people who arrive, enjoy the island and then leave.
It made me wonder how much knowledge is contained in work we rarely stop to examine.
What does a beach vendor understand about tourism that might never appear in a tourism report? What has she learned about human behaviour from meeting people from around the world? What does she know about enterprise, uncertainty and sustaining a livelihood from one season to the next?
A person does not need a formal title to understand something deeply.
That thought followed me home.
The taxi driver and the vendor were not presented to me as experts. Yet each understood something important about migration, belonging, tourism, enterprise and life between islands. Their knowledge came from living inside those realities.
How much wisdom do we overlook because it does not arrive through the channels we have been taught to respect?
We tend to ask countries in the Global South a particular set of questions.
What do you need?
What do you lack?
What is not working?
Who should come and help you fix it?
These questions may be necessary, but imagine what might shift if we also asked:
What wisdom would your country contribute to the Global South?
Not what makes your country marketable. Not the slogan printed beneath its tourism logo. Not the polished answer prepared for an international audience.
What has your country learned from what it has lived through?
What do its people understand about survival, community, migration, enterprise, healing, leadership or beginning again?
What knowledge is held by the people we pass every day without asking what they know?
I keep returning to the fact that neither of my conversations in The Bahamas was planned. If I had remained focused only on getting to my destination or completing a purchase, I might have missed both of them.
How many meaningful exchanges do we miss because we have already decided who has something to teach us?
That question became part of the foundation for Sankofa.
I want to travel with greater attention. I want to leave room for the conversations that happen outside official programmes and scheduled meetings. I want to speak with leaders, researchers and practitioners, but also with taxi drivers, vendors, artisans, workers, elders and people I meet by chance.
Not because every encounter must become content. Some conversations should remain exactly where they happened. But I want to become more conscious of the wisdom moving around us quietly, often without recognition.
Soon, I will travel to China. I will meet people from different countries, encounter unfamiliar systems and listen to perspectives shaped by histories very different from my own.
I intend to carry the question with me.
What wisdom would your country contribute to the Global South?
I do not know what people will say. That is what makes the question worth asking.
Perhaps someone will speak about rebuilding after conflict. Perhaps another person will talk about community, technology, food, public institutions or the ways families care for one another. Perhaps someone will reject the question or need time to sit with it.
I hope they do sit with it.
I hope you do too.
If I asked you today, what would your answer be?
Not the official answer. Yours.
What has your country lived through, learned and carried that someone elsewhere might need to hear?
The question began for me in The Bahamas, somewhere between a taxi ride and a conversation on the beach.
Now I am curious to see where it leads.