Ch. 5, Pt. 4: Road to Podor – Sofi
Everybody was silent, looking out the windows at the unfolding landscape. The bus moved along Route N2 as the road began curving eastward. Now, we decelerated. On the left side of the road, I...
Tagged: Africa
Ch. 5, Pt. 3: Road to Podor – Ricardo
The barren landscape of sand and scrub brush stretching toward the horizon on both sides of the bus was interrupted by a line of steel towers, each connected to the next by three power...
Ch. 5, Pt. 2: Road to Podor – Hercule
“We’re going to head east now,” Raphael announced in French as the driver turned left on a road, called Route N2, directly in front of a large gas station displaying a sign with a...
Ch. 5, Pt. 1: Road to Podor – Raphael
Music drifted through the warm air. At one edge of the dining room on the threshold of an open glass door leading to the courtyard a tall floor fan turned slowly on its axis,...
Ch. 4: Guet N’Dar
It was already too hot. Moving south across N’Dar Island, Lomax stopped, removed his cell phone from a pocket of his photographer’s vest, and checked the temperature: 29°C. I stopped next to him and...
Ch. 3: Ismael and Hamimu – St. Louis
It wasn’t too hot. The temperature on that Friday in St. Louis was agreeable, 22 degrees Celsius, while Lomax and I sat at a table under a big umbrella with remnants of our breakfast....
Ch. 2: Esby and Lomax – St. Louis
When a few minutes before 3:00pm, our driver, Joseph, who had said little since we left Dakar, drove us into Saint Louis, not far from the border with Mauritania, I felt my anxiety rise....
Ch. 1: In Plain Sight – Dakar
I had been on longer flights. But this one was particularly uncomfortable. Lomax, my younger brother, didn’t fare much better on the plane, but he could brush it off faster because he liked to...
Locals Work Their Land
In Africa, the Chinese have acquired large plots of land to build farms and develop new food sources for a large population back home. Rising demand by Chinese consumers has exceeded the capacity of...
Small Farmers Saving the World
Almost 1 billion people across the globe are undernourished, according to data from the United Nations. As an additional 2 to 3 billion people join the world’s population by 2050, public health officials warn...