peregrine by nature

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.

sometimes you stay in bed

-the national

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.

Me I’m a prodigal daughter, but on the road home.

Tea keeps hunger off the mind. These are the lean times.

i wish i lived off of red dirt roads.

Sometimes it seemed to stoop so close you could touch it but your heart would break.

-thank you, rich. someday we’ll meet.

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.

Investing in small, locally run businesses is the best thing individuals can do for my country. I would like to partner with some friends here and start 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 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.’

wow

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)

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.
One of the Rats of Nimh on the short story, The Rat Race

“It was about a woman in a small town who bought a vacuum cleaner. Her name was Mrs. Jones, and up until then she, like all her neighbors, had kept her house spotlessly clean by using a broom and a mop. But the vacuum cleaner did it faster and better, and soon Mrs. Jones was the envy of all the other housewives in town- so they bought vacuum cleaners, too.

The vacuum cleaner business was so brisk, in fact, that the company that made them opened a branch factory in town. The factory used a lot of electricity, of course, and so did the women with their vacuum cleaners, so the local electric power company had to put up a big new plant to keep them all running. In its furnaces the power plant burned coal, and out of its chimneys black smoke poured day and night, blanketing the town with soot and making all the floors dirtier than ever. Still, by working twice as hard and twice as long the women of the town were able to keep their floors almost as clean as they had been before Mrs. Jones ever bought a vacuum cleaner in the first place.

…the reason I had read it so eagerly was that it was called “The Rat Race”- which, I learned, means a race where, no matter how fast you run, you don’t get anywhere. But there was nothing in the book about rats, and I felt bad about the title because, I thought, it wasn’t a rat race at all, it was a People Race…”