I am grateful for these friendships, and I have a hard time getting it when people say this community has failed... I have never felt that you have failed me. In fact, so many of you have shaped me.

I remember one day sitting near the beach in Dakar drinking coffee with Lars and a friend of his. It was the first time we'd actually met, and we only had about 3-4 hours to absorb each other face-to-face before I headed back to Uganda after a long trip across West Africa. I'd been working on training surveyors for a large international research firm. They were planning to survey remote areas. Something wasn't quite right with it all in the pilot surveys that were coming back from the trainees, and I couldn't put my finger on it until Lars asked his FIRST question about the project after I told him about it: How have they accounted for innumeracy?

West Africa had already blasted a couple of craters in my mind, and this one that Lars triggered was so profound I couldn't even verbalize it later when I tried to write here about all that was going in in my freaked out (just turning 40) mind. Our global system is dominated by people, corporations and institutions who know how to control and manipulate numbers very well. If you don't understand the basics of numbers, you don't get very far in the system. In Africa there are a lot of kids who have missed a lot of school while out fighting in horrific wars. There are a lot of other kids who miss out on primary school education simply because they are poor. Lybia's Gadaffi is ready to supply the whole continent with guns. What a recipe for disaster. My mind was simply reeling with urgency - how do we stop the inevitable??!

Though I never told Lars before now, the new insights into numeracy/literacy that his question and subsequent stories about his mother's work with women in Senegal imparted would haunt me for the next year and a half. Here I was working with a heavily war-affected population, with lots of disruptions in their educations, telling them they could and should manage things themselves... and yet the numeracy (and literacy) levels within the community made it near impossible for that to happen well. It's an issue that's haunted all of us, and yet it's also one that's brought humble moments of forgiveness within the community. It really isn't the community's fault that their educations have almost all suffered gaps. Yes - they are bound to be imperfect on that front. They understand and accept that they have that weakness. But it's never too late to learn - and they want to.

Seeing first hand how crippling the low literacy and numeracy levels are to managing self-determined development, I've thought a lot more deeply this past year than I ever have about education. Finally, after many years of steering way clear of getting Life in Africa involved in school fees sponsorships, I have understood with a new certainty the urgent importance of getting these kids educated. It would be great if we could convince the parents to have fewer children in hindsight, or if we could raise family incomes quickly enough to absorb educational costs before the children are all grown up. I have tried to encourage the latter and observed over time a simple maxim - kids grow faster than most businesses do. For the working poor, school fees for one child can often cost a month's salary, and very few families have just one child. The economics of it all simply do not make sense, and it's not the children's fault!!!

sea change

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A new emphasis on education will be a feature of the new Life in Africa (USA). So someday down the line when Life in Africa is building schools, investing in adult literacy and numeracy training, and successfully sponsoring hundreds of kids in Africa through school, just remember to blame Lars. He started it! On a terrace in Dakar...