peregrine by nature

Don’t come to Africa if you think you have nothing to learn here. Take the west with all its time saving gadgets and falsely modest claims of the workaholic and see that it is yet unsatisfied, as empty as a vacuum.

The Rats of Nimh

by night you twist and turn and try not to dream and by day you haunt a house you can’t breathe in, can’t eat. but you’re changing.

Attaya, or gunpowder tea is strong, sweet tea served in tiny glassfuls in a 3 round ritual. Water is boiled on a fuurnu with a small packet of tea leaves and a full kas of sugar, each round with added sugar to symbolize the growing sweetness of friendship. Or, alternatively, the first bitter round is for life, the second for friendship and the third is the sweetest, for love. The tea is poured impossibly high from kas to kas, up to a two foot arc without spilling a drop. This creates delicious foam. Return warga to fuurnu and bring back to a boil. Serve scalding hot. Second and third rounds add mint.

When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then – that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it.
–CS Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

There are 10,000 talibes on the streets of Dakar, taken from their rural villages at a young age by a marabout, a Muslim religious leader with credibility elsewhere but in Senegal is using the ancient practice to exploit.

Talibes go barefoot onto the streets of Dakar to beg for their food and for money. If they do not bring a sufficient sum to the marabout at the end of the day they are beaten. They also are isolated in that they often can only speak their tribal language, of which there are 36 spoken in Senegal alone. Read more about them here.