The first thing Tangeni learned about Windhoek was that it was louder than anywhere he'd ever been, a constant roar of traffic and voices and construction and a hundred other sounds that blended together into a wall of noise that never really stopped no matter what time of day it was.
The second thing he learned was that nobody cared who you were or where you came from, which was both terrifying and liberating in equal measure because it meant nobody was going to help you but it also meant nobody was going to single you out for special punishment.
He walked through the streets with his bag over his shoulder, taking in the buildings and the people and the general chaos of city life, and tried to figure out what he was supposed to do next now that he was actually here.
The city was bigger than he'd imagined, spreading out in every direction with different neighborhoods that seemed to have different rules and different types of people, and navigating it felt like trying to solve a puzzle without knowing what the picture was supposed to look like.
The hundred dollars Festus had given him felt like a lot of money back in Omafo where there was nothing to spend money on, but here in the city where everything cost something it wouldn't last long, maybe a week or two if he was extremely careful and didn't eat much, and after that he'd be on his own with nothing.
He needed to find shelter first, then food, then some kind of work that would let him survive long enough to figure out a real plan.
The shelter part turned out to be harder than he expected because Windhoek wasn't the kind of city that had a lot of options for homeless teenagers with no connections and no references and no ID except for an academy card that identified him as someone who wasn't supposed to be here.
He tried three different shelters throughout the day and got turned away from all of them, either because they were full or because they required documentation he didn't have or because they didn't take in people who looked like runaways.
One of the shelter workers told him that if he was running from home they'd have to contact his parents, and Tangeni left so fast he nearly knocked over someone in the doorway because the last thing he needed was someone calling Omafo and telling them where he was.
By the time the sun went down he'd been walking for hours and his feet were blistered and his options had narrowed to exactly one: find somewhere to sleep that wasn't completely exposed and hope nobody bothered him during the night.
He ended up in an alley between two buildings in a part of the city that didn't look particularly safe but also didn't look like anywhere anyone would come looking for a runaway from Omafo, and he wedged himself between two dumpsters with his bag clutched to his chest and tried to sleep.
Every noise made him jump because he kept expecting someone to find him and drag him back to a life he was trying to escape, or worse, someone who just wanted to hurt him because he was alone and vulnerable and an easy target.
The alley smelled like garbage and something else he didn't want to identify, and the ground was cold and hard under his back, and this was nothing like the adventure stories he'd read as a kid where running away led to exciting discoveries and helpful strangers.
Nobody came.
He woke up with the sunrise, his back aching from the concrete and his stomach growling loud enough to hear from across the alley, and he found a public bathroom in a nearby park where he could wash his face and change into his spare clothes and make himself look slightly less like someone who'd spent the night sleeping next to garbage.
The day was spent walking and looking and trying to figure out how the city worked, which parts were safe and which weren't, where the opportunities were and where the dangers were hiding.
He learned to read the signs, the way people walked in certain neighborhoods versus others, the places where homeless people gathered and the places where they were chased away, the invisible borders that separated different parts of the city.
By afternoon he'd found a neighborhood called Katutura that seemed to have more people in situations similar to his, people living on the margins and making do with whatever they could scrape together.
An old woman was selling roasted corn on a street corner, her face weathered by years of sun and wind, and Tangeni bought one with some of his precious money and asked her if she knew of any places where a person could find work without too many questions being asked.
She looked at him for a long moment, taking in his age and his clothes and the slightly desperate look in his eyes that he couldn't quite hide, and then she told him about the markets in the industrial district where people sometimes needed help loading trucks or cleaning up or doing whatever else needed doing on any given day.
"It's not good work," she said, "and the pay isn't much, but it's honest and it'll keep you eating while you figure out your next step."
Tangeni thanked her and ate his corn while walking toward the industrial district, and by the end of the day he'd made twenty dollars hauling boxes for a vendor who was closing up shop and needed extra hands.
Twenty dollars wasn't much in the grand scheme of things, but it was enough to buy dinner and a thin blanket and still have some left over for tomorrow, and he felt something that might have been pride at having earned it himself without anyone helping him.
He found a spot under an overpass where a few other homeless people had set up camp, cardboard shelters and makeshift bedding scattered around in no particular order, and asked if he could sleep there too.
They looked at him the way everyone looked at new people in situations like this, suspicious and territorial but not necessarily hostile, and one of them eventually shrugged and said he could stay as long as he didn't cause trouble or bring any attention to the group.
"I won't," Tangeni said, and he meant it, and he set up his blanket in a corner away from the others and tried to sleep while the city noise roared on around him.
This was his life now.
He'd traded one kind of survival for another, a concrete box where people threw rocks at him for a concrete jungle where nobody cared if he lived or died, and he had no idea if it was better or worse but at least here nobody was using him for target practice.
At least here he had a choice about what happened next, and even if all his choices were bad ones, at least they were his to make.
He fell asleep listening to the sounds of the city, the distant traffic and the occasional voices of his fellow homeless people, and dreamed of nothing at all.