The past few weeks, months, really, have been intensely packed with life…work, clients’ landmark transition moments, deaths, stock markets, a book release, my daughter’s engagement, travel to multiple conferences, building projects, family tribulations, reunions with dear friends, and so much more.
In the air now, flying over North Africa, heading south, all that is falling away. Left behind in another world, another life. Ahead, it feels as though an even more real life awaits. As we fly ever closer to Senegal, that feeling strengthens and the sounds and scents of Africa begin to overtake my senses. The call to prayer sings in my ears. My ideas are beginning to form in French instead of English. The faces of my Godchildren clarify in my mind. The challenges and miseries and joys lived everyday by the forced begging talibé boys of Saint Louis and the young girls in the remote desert region who have embraced education and are pushing back against early forced marriage invade my thoughts, displacing what usually occupies my mind.
The day of our departure from Canada- devastating news: Due to the cancellation of US funds, an important United Nations grant my Dad has spent months of his life securing and maintaining for Maison de la Gare is no more. It is hard not to connect the dots from a new ballroom and some tax cuts in America to the possible impact on the daily lived reality of thousands of vulnerable children I have fought for for 15 years.
But I have learned Senegal is resilient. And resourceful. Maison de la Gare will find a way. Hundreds of Canadians, Americans, and many people in other parts of the world and in Senegal also help to sustain the work of Maison de la Gare. We will work harder to strengthen these other pillars that have helped build the Senegalese team that has led Maison de la Gare to become such a beacon of hope and change for some of the planet’s most vulnerable children. And hopefully new pillars will also be found, despite a seemingly ever more self interested and inward looking world.
Through all this uncertainty, the project of building schools in the desert that has led to the repatriation of talibes to their homes, as well as opening education to girls, continues. We will be travelling into “the bush” next week to again visit the village schools and to review the building progress of the new, third permanent cement school (replacing a straw school that had been destroyed and rebuilt too often after many rainy seasons). While visiting the schools, Rowan will present the second Suxali scholarship to an unmarried girl for a post secondary health care degree, and we will meet with last year’s inaugural Bourse Suxali recipient to renew her scholarship as she begins her second year of nursing studies. And of course, Rowan will visit her ever-growing flock of sheep- expanded from the gift of one small lamb over six years ago.
The welcome and smiles of our friends, many of whom are like family, await us. The karate boys, and their courage and perseverance and strength of character await us. The welcome of the land of taranga awaits us.
