She broke one plate. Then she crossed the entire country.

Ten-year-old Amina Danjuma has a habit of treating small problems as catastrophes. So when she accidentally cracks her stepmother’s good plate — the special one wrapped in cloth from Zaria — she doesn’t think she’ll be scolded. She thinks her life is over. And before the dust has settled in the family compound in Kaduna, Amina has stitched a five-naira coin into her hem, packed a stolen tin of kilishi, and hidden under a tarpaulin in the first bus heading south.

She doesn’t know where the bus is going. She only knows that “south” means away.

The bus delivers her to Yenagoa, Bayelsa State — a wet, green, river-soaked world that feels like another country entirely. There she is discovered by Margaret, a sharp-eyed widow who only came to the motor park looking for a missing crate and instead found a runaway child telling increasingly unconvincing lies about an aunt named Margaret who lives “near the water.”

Under Margaret’s roof, Amina learns to eat garri, survive crabs, negotiate with rain she is convinced is falling through a hole in the sky — and, slowly, to grow. From Yenagoa she moves to Lagos, where the danfo buses, conductors, traffic and markets teach her the one lesson fear never could: how to stand on her own two feet.

Meanwhile, in Kaduna, a family has spent eleven years searching. They have consulted the police, the imams, the radio, and a cousin who is still certain she became a newsreader in the east. Nobody imagined the truth — that the whole enormous story began with a small crack across a small plate.

Warm, wildly funny and unmistakably Nigerian, Chai Amina is a coming-of-age adventure about the enormous things small incidents can start, the families who keep a light on for us, and one girl who set out to run away and instead found her way home.

Chai, Amina.