Why we bring footballs to every village

Most years a few of us drive cheap old cars across West Africa on what we call the Africa Rally, through villages that almost never see outsiders. Early on, we had to work out what, if anything, to bring.

We started with pens and notebooks. It made sense on paper: useful, worthy. But handing out school supplies turns you into an event, a queue, a person with things other people want.

So we switched to footballs. Now we travel with a checked bag full of them, and they have changed how we move through places. A ball does not need a shared language. You do not hand it over, you drop it and join in. Within a minute you are not tourists taking photos, you are just the slow team losing badly.

The best of it happened deep in Guinea. One of our cars had punched holes in its fuel tank on a terrible road, and while it was being patched, a few hundred children poured out of a village that had looked half asleep when we drove through it. We played on the main road until the light went. We lost that one too, comprehensively. It was the highlight of the whole Africa Rally, and it only happened because the car broke in the right place.

A football costs almost nothing and weighs almost nothing. It is the most useful thing we pack, and the reason some of our warmest memories are of villages whose names we never learned.

Bring a ball. It does more than any guidebook phrase you will try to memorise.