In 2023 I was surfing in Busua, a small town on the west coast of Ghana. There was a guy there who seemed to be at the beach whenever I was, always with the same group of local kids.
When there were waves he had them working on their surfing. When it went flat he found something else: training on the sand, a session in the pool, yoga in the afternoon. In the evenings they'd sit together going through video of their own surfing. He organised events for the community and took them on trips to other parts of the country.
That was Fayed.
He was volunteering at the local surf school, and he helped those kids in every way he could think of. Surfing had given him something, and he was trying to share it back with the local community. Seeing his work was truly inspiring, and it stayed with me long after I left.
Fayed was born in Mayotte, a French island in the Mozambique Channel, between Madagascar and the East African coast. There are photographs of him in the sea before his first birthday.
He was three when he left for Brittany. The Atlantic there is cold, nothing like the water he'd come from. He was eight when he moved again, this time to Martinique. Three different continents before he was a teenager, and the one thing that stayed with him through all of it was the ocean.
He'd been in the sea his whole life, and Martinique was no different.
One day he was in the shorebreak on the northeast coast with a few friends, messing around on a bodyboard, when a sports teacher walked past, stopped to watch, and offered to teach them.
He taught them every week, all year, for free, and never asked for anything in return. That was the moment everything changed for Fayed.
Everything after that was built around the water. He took the surf option at his secondary school and had lessons year-round. At weekends he went north with the club to surf different breaks, sometimes places so hard to get to that you had to really want it.
He's been teaching surfing ever since, in France, Indonesia, Australia, Martinique and West Africa.
Ninety percent of my friends and most of my travels came from surfing. I feel at home almost anywhere now because of it.
It was a while before I put the two things together. What he was doing in Busua was what that teacher had done for him, the same way, for the same reasons.
One person passed it on for free, and it kept going, all the way to a beach in Ghana. I've not seen a better argument for what surfing can do for a place than his work in Busua.
Surfing teaches you humility in front of the ocean, and holding onto that feeling can pay off a lot in the rest of your life as well.
Fayed has always talked about Martinique with real excitement, and at the end of November he gets to show us around.
The teacher who first taught him to surf is called Régis Mengual. He's still coaching on the island, and he'll be one of our instructors on the trip. Which means a week in the water with both of them: the teacher, and the kid he taught.
We have last spots left and we'd love to have you there.
Fayed is on Instagram at @fayednouvian.
