(I had a bunch of photographs loaded but then the power was cut. Welcome to Africa! I'll try to add the rest of them eventually.)

There were a few things I needed to do before I landed in Senegal: remember how to speak French, read my guidebook, figure out where I was going to stay in Dakar, and get a solid night's sleep. I didn't do any of them.

About half an hour before my plane landed I started talking to the old Senegalese man sitting next to me. Are you going to Dakar? Is it your first time in Senegal? Where are you staying? You're all alone? Be careful with the taxi drivers at night, you never know, come to think of it look for me after you pass through customs I'll negotiate a fare for you.

And before I had even touched ground, before I had a single franc in my pocket, I had a friend in this country. Over the next few days that he was in Dakar, Demba gave me a place to stay, helped me get a Malian visa, introduced me to his extended family who stuffed me full with delicious couscous and fish, and taught me my first words in Wolof.

And in return, he asked for absolutely nothing, turned down nearly everything I offered. And all I could do before he left for his home along the Mauritanian border (where, I later learned, he is the "chef du village") was give him my sincerest thanks. He said it was nothing, really, as a Muslim it is his duty to help anyone he sees who is in need. He told me about stealing away unannounced from his home at the age of 17 through Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinée in search of work, eventually ending up in France without papers and later Germany, where he has lived for the past couple decades. And when he arrived in Europe he didn't know anyone, but strangers helped him out, asked nothing in return. It's nothing, really, he told me, la vie est comme ça.

And I thought back to intro microecon lectures, that refrain of "there's no such thing as free lunch" resounding through the lecture hall of SSS, and all I could think was that it was all bullshit.

And as improbable as meeting Demba had seemed, a couple days later the whole thing happened again. Walking around Dakar I stopped to look at my map and a guy came up to me asking if he could help me find something. He directed me to the building I'd been looking for. And then he gave me a tour of the centre-ville. And then he invited me to lunch at his home in Guédiawaye in the Dakar banlieux (mostly dirt and sand roads, goats tied to the outside of houses, men in long colorful boubous, kids playing soccer or marbles in the street, or running after rubber tires prodded onwards with sticks, women selling French bread or bags of peanuts, green mangos, cigarettes one by one, never by the pack). And then I met the entire family. And then I met the entire block. And then they invited me to stay. And I did.

I was given a small room, a mattress on the floor, a bucket of water every morning to wash myself with next to a squat toilet, meals in the living room where eight people squatted around a meal of spiced fish, rice and vegetables and ate from the same bowl, some with hands, some with spoons. And in return, they asked for absolutely nothing. And I ended up giving them what I would have been paying at a hotel anyway. But they asked for nothing. And when, several times a day, I gave them my sincerest thanks, they just looked embarrassed. It's nothing, really, la vie est comme ça. Life is just like that.

These are the kindest people in the world, and we have a hell of a lot to learn.

One of the main tourist sites in Dakar is l'Ile de Gorée, a small island that houses the Maison des Esclaves (House of Slaves). Along with the slave forts in Ghana and other sites along the West African coast, the site has been turned into a monument to the horrors of the slave trade and the Middle Passage. "Only" about 300 enslaved Africans were imprisoned at the Maison des Esclaves each year before they were packed onto slave ships, but the house has become a focal point for remembering. You may have seen photographs of Clinton and Bush here alongside what has been named "La Porte Sans Retour" (The Door of No Return, through which it's said that the enslaved Africans passed into the belly of the slave ships, though this claim, good for tourism, is historically rather dubious given the preponderance of large rocks alongside the coast that would've prevented the ships from approaching so close to land). La Porte Sans Retour is where visiting dignitaries, actors, singers and athletes come to reflect on the slave trade, to be moved to tears-- and to be photographed doing it.

As a descendant of slaveholders, as an American, or best said as a human being I had expected to be moved visiting the Maison des Esclaves. But then I walked in alongside throngs of other white tourists who, before they could have even conceivably reflected on what they were looking at, took out their digital cameras to take snapshots. And I imagined their interminable slideshows back home later (this is the hotel, this is the beach, oh and this is the door without return, I nearly cried), imagined their friends' furrowed brows, their silent self-congratulations on their racial sensitivity, and within minutes of walking in all I wanted to do was leave.

I realized that there can be no fixed monument to the slave trade and what followed; it is not a site that can be visited in a day, captured in a photograph, grappled with to any satisfaction, ever contained. There can be no fixed monument to the inhumanity of slavery. It is a monument that visits you, whether you were expecting it or not--when you walk into an elevator in San Francisco and see a black deliveryman with your family's name embroidered on his uniform; or here in Senegal, when you see a man who looks exactly like a guy you've seen in passing around campus, they could be cousins (they could be); or at the beach one evening looking out at the Atlantic towards Connecticut missing friends one moment, then the next, an image coming to your mind of the bodies that must line the ocean floor between you and them. It is a monument that visits you.

After a week and a half living in Guédiawaye (meals from the big bowl, cup after cup of mint tea drunk among friends over the space of several hours, pickup soccer games in the sand, entertaining the entire quartier with my pigeon Wolof, watching Senegalese music videos while the kids danced along, or Colombian soaps dubbed into French with the older women while they beaded or braided hair extensions) I figured I should try to see a bit of the rest of the country.

I went north along the coast to the former French colonial capital of St. Louis, and across the border into Mauritania for two days to beautiful sand dunes and Berber villages (and, admittedly, to be able to say that Maura was in Mauritania ... simple minds, simple pleasures).

Without knowing why exactly, but maybe drawn by that quintessentially American longing for the open road, I set off east on the Senegal side of the Mauritanian border to the little town of Podor. After 7 hours waiting for the shared taxi heading there to fill up and then an additional four, stiflingly hot hours on the road, I arrived in Podor with the faint recollection that I had once wanted to see the interesting mosque and colonial fort that a short paragraph in my guidebook had mentioned--but mostly wondering why I had bothered to come at all.

And then, walking down the street with my backpack looking for the auberge I had circled in my book, I came across a twelve-year-old girl who seemed to have been expecting me all along. I asked her for directions to the auberge and she took me by the hand, started jabbering away, took me to meet her uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents, friends, neighbors and anyone else we ran across walking to her house. She introduced me to her mother, who greeted me with open arms and a spare bed, the insistence that I stay for the weekend. Later her eight-year-old son Félix, 15-year-old son Jean, and her parents joined us on a mat laid out under the stars in the courtyard of the house and we shared dinner.

It was hot as hell; there were birds that flew in and out of the rooms, a frog that found its way into my room and didn't seem inclined to leave, the occasional mouse, and huge roaches that, come nightfall, swarmed around the squat toilet dug into the dirt. And I would've been crazy to let any of it bother me much.

That first night I wrote in my journal: "these are the kindest people in the world." And of fifteen-year-old Jean: "he is intimidatingly smart."

The next day the kids took me all over town to meet their friends and family, and share meals and tea. They asked me if I had a camera and I told them I did. We took photographs for hours, and when he showed particular interest, I taught Jean how to use the camera and some basic rules of composition. He asked me if I had a cell phone and I told him I did, let him use it look at it for awhile. He asked me about life in the States-- does everyone at my school have a cell phone? Does everyone have a laptop? After lunch I realized he hadn't given my cell phone back but I figured he'd just forgotten, no harm done.

And then later that evening the same thing happened again, and he disappeared for hours.

His sister asked me where my phone was and I told her her brother had forgotten to give it back to me earlier, I'd have to ask him for it when I saw him. She looked alarmed and told her grandmother, who told the mother, who explained that Jean had stopped going to school, she couldn't control him on her own with her husband in France working to support the family. My hopes that there had been a simple misunderstanding cast aside, she insisted that Jean had stolen the phone and was planning on selling it, maybe already had. All day he'd been asking her to buy him a cell phone like I had, a camera like I had, the other things I have that are so incalculably beyond the means of a family living hand to mouth as so many here in Senegal are.

I ended up getting the cell phone back, but it was clear that I had to go. And to be honest even if it had been lost I could have given a shit about the cell phone-- I hadn't even bothered to get it to work in Senegal; it's really only there to wake me up in the morning and to keep my parents from worrying about me too much.

But my only real rule for traveling is to first, do no harm. And my presence in Podor was doing harm. Before I left the following morning the family gave me breakfast, a length of cloth and a bracelet. The younger kids started crying, and the older family members asked me again and again to stay. I was devastated to be leaving, angry at a world in which I can't be bothered to give a damn about a phone that cost more than that family of seven will see in a month, but unable to be angry at a fifteen-year-old kid smart enough to recognize that the world is not fair, and stubborn enough not to excuse it, as his mother did, as ce que le bondieu veuille (what God wants for each of us).

Jean is intimidatingly smart, and if he had been born in different circumstances he could have been at Yale. But he was born in rural Senegal, so instead he's trying to steal my shit. And I just couldn't be angry at him for that; but it was also clear that I couldn't stay.

I came to Podor wondering why I had bothered. I was welcomed by astoundingly generous people who more than justified the trouble. I left sadly, but knowing why I had come. I came to Podor to be reminded that people can be limitlessly kind-- and also that the world can be limitlessly cruel.

I came back to Guédiawaye feeling that I had come home. In Guédiawaye I was given a small room, a mattress, bucket showers, a squat toilet and shared meals. In Guédiawaye I was also given what at the end of three weeks truly feels like a family, and a home. They asked for absolutely nothing in return, and I ended up giving them what I would have been paying at a hotel anyway but under no illusions that I was in any way repaying their kindness.

In Guédiawaye I passed afternoons drinking tea among friends, talking about nothing at all, or whether 2Pac is really dead (I was told he's hiding in Accra--"Why Ghana and not Senegal?" I asked. "Parce que Ghana est un pays anglophone." Of course.) On other afternoons we talked about the failing Senegalese economy, no work even for university graduates, the need to immigrate to Europe just to keep families fed. On others we talked about slavery, the fact that my ancestors owned men and women stolen from these coasts. There can be no fixed monument to the slave trade because it is a monument that visits you. I left the Porte Sans Retour unmoved, but in Guédiawaye ended some days crying because it is overwhelming to be treated with the greatest humanity among people whom my ancestors treated with the least.

In Guédiawaye my family called me Aissata and gave me their family name Sow. I bore it as proudly as I hope the deliveryman in the San Francisco elevator bears my mother's family's name Deming as something fiercely his own. Or as proudly as the other descendants of my family's slaves may have cast off that name in exchange for another, not imposed, but chosen freely.

In Guédiawaye I was given everything and asked for nothing. These are the nicest people in the world, and they treated me with the best kindness-- kindness that cannot be repaid, but only passed on to others, expecting nothing in return because la vie est comme ça, that's just the way life is.

And I think about that Western mantra that "there is no such thing as free lunch," think about the reception we tend to give non-white immigrants in our countries, and then think about my friend Samba (the one who helped me with directions that first day) getting ready to immigrate to Spain just to see his family fed and the lights kept on. And I am scared for him, scared for what he will find, because human beings, capable of being limitlessly kind, are too often unimaginably cruel.

I love you guys. Please be good to one another.

Fitz