A fiche (form in French) is a small but essential piece of paper containing your personal data. At every military and police checkpoint you have to hand over one for each passenger of the car, and there are many of those checkpoints in Morocco , Western Sahara, and Mauritania. I’ve just finished cutting 180 fishes, that should be enough.

A few years ago the second most important French word to remember was cadeau, present. While fiches were only important to soldiers and policemen, petit cadeau was the most important thing for everyone, including soldiers and policemen. But things have changed. In 2011 we had two banana boxes full of petit cadeau and ran out of stuff somewhere in Senegal. In 2018 I returned to Europe with some of the swiss army knives still in my pocket. This year we take a few t-shirts, baseball caps, and the 4 leftover swiss army knives.