Bonjour les enfants !

Njêlbeen du dara. Mujj bu rafet moo am solo.
The beginning means nothing. A beautiful ending is what matters.

A flashlight trained on a white basket, enveloped in darkness so thick, I momentarily forget there are people huddled all around me. ‘In one month, we want to see 100 baskets that look just like this one’, I bellowed, feeling like some sort of artisanal prophet. ‘Can you do it? Will you do it?’ The ring of women around me sings a chorus of assurances: ‘Yes, no problem! We’ll do it in 2 weeks! God gave us an order and God will help us fill it! We’re ready!’

Sow chuckles and emphasizes, ‘Don’t just say yes. If you say yes, you are making a commitment. Can you make this basket in 5 days?’ A moment of consideration sobers the air, until the same chorus of enthusiastic yes’s comes raining down upon us. I hand off the flash light and allow myself a night-cloaked smile.

This is the way the journey began. Sow (Vice-President of the village Association, called And Suxali), Kebe (Treasurer), and the village women had the opportunity to take part in an order destined for France mere days after they had formed a cohesive group.

It seemed that every one of those first couple days, we were thrown to the ground at noon only to be picked back up again at sunset. Take the day we had the prototype basket made. This was the basket that the other 99 were to be copied off of, so it was important that it be perfect. We had dimensions, we had a picture, and I figured that we wouldn’t have a problem. Wrong. The first two attempts made me wince- they were half as tall and twice as wide as they were supposed to be. I called over the woman in charge of quality control and asked her what she thought of the baskets. She told me they were beautiful. I told her we had a problem. I asked her to get out her measuring tape and compare the basket to the dimensions we had given her. In the middle of chiding her about respecting commitments and following through, I stopped. The botched prototypes were more our mistake than hers. She can’t read numbers.

After a lesson in numerics and trying to come up with another way for her to measure baskets, I was off to the third village, praying that I would find an acceptable prototype there.

A charette (horse cart) ride in off the main road brought me tired, frustrated, and at this point without Sow or Kebe, through sand and sun to my destination. The kids in the village alternately running away from me yelping and running up to me to shake my hand, snot-nosed all the while, reminded me that the baskets are just a means to an end. Basket or no basket, life would go on.

I settled down into the chair provided and began running through plan B. I was awoken from my thoughts by the last thing I expected to see: a perfect, beautifully made basket. The tape measure confirmed my intuition, and I could hardly suppress my glee. In a moment I was fiving the woman who made it (I have yet to get a single Senegalese to high-five) and taking pictures like a bizarre, confused tourist.

I mounted the charette, perfect prototype in tow, and rode off into the sunset…