Day one in Dakar

Yesterday was a day of travelling from Europe to Africa. From our departure airports of Malaga, Barcelona and Marseille, the five of us met up in Madrid and travelled together on the five-hour flight down to Senegal. It was almost midnight when we finally arrived at our destination. This morning after breakfast, we and our hosts met to pray for the day. I had to smile when I realised that the seven of us were from seven different nations: France, Switzerland, Spain, Scotland, USA, New Zealand and Holland. We stayed within the city of Dakar today, meeting with government officials and representatives from forestation initiatives. One of the these was the project known as the "Great Green Wall," which is a vision to build a wall of trees, 15 kilometres wide, across the breadth of the African continent, starting in Senegal, reaching to Djibouti, and passing through eleven nations on the way. There are opportunities for teams of volunteers to be involved in the tree planting season, while at the same time reaching out to local villagers with other help such as language lessons, computer classes, primary health care, sports, and so on. Later in the week, we'll be travelling to visit similar projects that are based in other parts of the country. Our goal is to identify possible partners who would be able and willing to host teams of young people among their seasonal volunteers. Thanks for your prayers as we continue to visit places and make contact with people. Electricity is a bit erratic (we had no electricity for eight or nine hours today) and when there's no electricity there's no internet. But I'll post some more news here on the blog whenever I can.