The Backbone of Black History Month

February is Black History Month in North America. Fittingly, this is my second consecutive February in West Africa. Last year’s visit to LWR projects proved so personally transformational that from Burkina Faso. I text-messaged LWR board chair, Kirk Betts, with an invitation to join me in February 2009. Within two minutes he text-messaged me back, “Count me in.” Now we are here.

My reportage this year will go in two directions. I will attempt as usual to give you a look at the depth of our projects while I also go in search of the breadth of the metaphors that define these diverse communities in Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali.

Metaphors “serve as a repository of that culture’s dominant mode of intelligence and tradition,” according to Caribbean scholar, Patricia Ismond. Through our photographs and words, I hope to interweave LWR projects with the images, stories, and mythological truths animating the lives of the amazing people in the rural places where LWR works. My hunch is that this approach will intensify your profound sense of why this ministry matters. From these communities and these cultures you may acquire a deeper sense of the many metaphors that crossed the Atlantic in chains to the New World during the slave trade to become the backbone of Black History Month.