Sunday at Sea

Our time in Senegal is slowly drawing to a close. We've met many people and seen several different tree-related projects. We've chatted with missionaries and given them and their families little gifts from Spain. Above you can see 5 year old Dorcas, trying out a Spanish fan in the African heat. Today we went to a morning worship service at a local church and then we decided to take a boat trip out to Goree island. Its name means "good harbour" but Goree, now a national heritage site, used to be the "holding area" for African slaves before they were shipped across the Atlantic, separated from their families and sold to rich landowners who put them to work in the cotton plantations. Many thousands of Africans passed through there during two centuries of the slave trade, and many hundreds died there too. Several of our African King's Kids groups visited Goree back in 1996, when we were taking teams to work with African American churches during the Olympic Games in Atlanta. Part of our goal at that time was for African young people to be able to ask African Americans for forgiveness for the slave trade. (It wasn't only Americans and Europeans who traded in slaves; many Africans were also involved in capturing their brothers and selling them into slavery.) So today we had an opportunity to go to Goree island, and it was a sobering experience to visit a slave house like the one where thousands of men, women and children were imprisoned in squalid conditions before the slave trade was finally abolished in the 1800s. 
It was a beautiful day, though, and we enjoyed the short boat trip from the port of Dakar to the little island of Goree. Curtis, who took a Spanish KKI group to South Africa last year, said that it reminded him of the boat trip they took out to Robben Island to see where Nelson Mandela and others had been imprisoned during the apartheid years. Mandela made a visit to Goree in the 1990s, as did Pope John Paul, who asked the African people's forgiveness for the role that European Catholics had played in the trading of slaves.