Village of Cobo 3
On May 25 Cobo, the village pictured in this video (taken in April) and on this blog suffered a brush fire and 20 huts burned along with food supplies and seeds for planting. If you want to get involved, we need volunteers to build in southeastern Senegal or you can use the below link to make a donation. I will keep you updated as to the rebuild. Thank you! Love.
June 02, 2009
Did I waste it? 13
not so much i couldn’t taste it. life should be fragrant; rooftop to the basement.
-bono
An old book, in my old room, by the light of a kerosene lantern.
May 06, 2009
Sometimes the night was beautiful 11
Sometimes it seemed to stoop so close you could touch it but your heart would break.
-thank you, rich. someday we’ll meet.
April 11, 2009
it is not known why whales get stranded 5
fast arriving at where i might have been if it weren’t for inept echolocation or the lure of cheap, shiny, barbed things or falling into that Ziguinchor brook and almost drowning.
March 31, 2009
Going home, where the NYC winters aren’t bleeding me 13
I truly believe investing in small, locally run businesses is the best thing individuals can do for my country. In fact, I would like to partner with some friends here and start just such an enterprise in my home village of Chobo.
A missionary couple who has been in their village for over 20 years asked me how I would handle the jealousy and strife this enterprise would cause. I was incredulous when they gave me this example.
‘We have several boxes of clothing to give away that have been in storage for several months now. We haven’t given the clothes away to the villagers because doing so will only invoke jealousy and quarrelling between those who received something and those who haven’t. You know how these people are. In fact, we have pretty much decided that we will just burn the boxes of clothes.’
How would you respond to such a question? Is burning clothing in a poor country sending a message of love?
March 28, 2009
Paradise or sacrifice? 4
People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Away with the word in such a view and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. I never made a sacrifice.
–Speech by David Livingstone to students at Cambridge University (4 December 1857)
March 24, 2009
Friendships and tea are best made slowly 8
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.
March 14, 2009
