The story of Nouadhibou is a way to get to Europe

Nouadhibou beach -- small peninsula off Mauritania. Half its width shared with the Western Sahara.

If anyone ever wonders how bad it is in Africa, just see what people are doing to get out. The pregnant mother who takes to the sea to get to La Reunion off the east coast of Africa just so she can have her baby somewhere that's French. A Senegalese who travels to Morroco in an attempt, with thousands of others, to storm the fence that serves as the border with Spain. The Guinean who journeys one taxi after another through his own country, through Gambia, Senegal, Mauritania and finally to Nouadhibou where he looks twice at a boat and the sliver of place where he'd be put, stares out at the ocean and the $600 it would cost him to slip into a small opening of a chance at a better life. The travel is three days, maybe four, the boat is small and questionable, hundreds of others are pushing on to it, maybe there will be enough fuel, maybe enough water, maybe the coast guards won't catch them, maybe the boat won't go down in the sea. And even then, it only brings him to the Canary Islands, a property of Spain, but not Spain itself. Maybe it's better to try for something better than whiling your life away to nothing. Maybe if you make it, you can send money home to your family and that minimum wage job, for example, in America can go a long way to feeding someone in Africa. And that's the chorus.

A place where desert meets ocean.

Look around you, if you don't see African faces in your neighborhood, you will. If you want to continue to ignore the drought, the desertification, the poverty, the wars, the corruption of Africa, it will come to you, smack in the face through riots in Paris or the immigrants landing wide-eyed and sweat-stained in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I'm only saying it because it hurts to know if the going gets tough I can fly outta here anytime I want, but my good friends living here, can't. Together we sit on the beach staring out at the ocean watching the planes fly in close and low -- I know what it feels like to be on one o' them, I know where it takes me, but do you? I can love this place and these people, but I can never really invite them chez moi. And yet I stutter as I weigh what I'll do in the future tip toeing between finding work at home, mooching off my family for a few months, staying in Senegal, or finding another reason to take me overseas. I may not be an American who likes Big Macs and Cokes, but I am one who constantly revels in the choices, and yet my friends here can't even find one single job. But coming where I come from means I will always find work, I will always go to school, always have money and food and a place to live. It makes you wonder how to define a human right. The right to change my mind ten thousand times?

Taking in the spray of the ocean.

And that's what Nouadhibou did to me. Made me feel and question and instead of marveling at why someone would be crazy enough to take a three-day pirogue ride into the ocean, I wondered what's pushing someone to even consider it. But even as I write of the "conditions of Africa" I chide myself because there is so much good here and even in its direness, there are the people who smile and greet you like no other day is a comin' and businesses that succeed and people who make it. I guess there's no real way to grasp the whole picture and I'm flailing only to understand a small part of it, my part in it.