The start
The idea for “Colours for Africa” started in our first trip in Morocco, more precisely in Tafraoute at the Cycle Expedition organized by Cycle et Company. One morning we woke up and at the sight of a few children we decided to take out a small box of colours we had brought with us, after 15 minutes our camp had turned in to a full child area. The next year once we had returned in Europe we started organising collection points and events to collect as much school material as possible.
Event Flyers
The Build-up
After one year preparing our journey and organising events and collection points we managed to fill our trucks with about 1 ton of school material. But our goal was still not reached! A few months before departure we stayed about 3 weeks at some friends warehouse at “La Papetterie” where we built some carnival games that we would bring with us to set up small fun fairs everywhere we wanted. After a few more detours we were finally ready to leave for the most amazing trip of our lives.
The Voyaje
Most of the trip went smooth. We stayed in Morocco for about a month with part of our group whom stayed there after our departure. It took us about two weeks to get through Western Sahara and Mauritania to then finally arrive in Senegal, here we stayed about two weeks and we managed to organise events, one in the village of Mbafaya close to Fatik and the other in Sokone. After this we quickly went towards Guinea Bissau to participate in the capitol’s notorious carnival. We stayed about one month in this country where we had the pleasure to visit some of the most beautiful places of the whole trip including the fabulous Bijagos Islands. Sadly the last days in Buissau where cut short due to the risk of being blocked there because there where rumours of borders closing because of this new pandemic. It didn’t seem possible at the time but we anyway went as quick as possible towards Senegal. We then decided to go to Kafountine a small village on the cost of the Casamance region because a friend of ours had a good friend living there, so we decided to go and stay for about a week, little did we know we were going to stay a bit longer than that. A few days after our arrival the country was in lockdown with a curfew from 8 pm till 6 am. We were blocked.
Quarantine in Kafountine wasn’t as bad as some people would think. We had all the freedom to go to our local restaurants, have long walks on the beach and, with the help of Buju (our Kafountine contact), we managed to make a lot of local friends. It was a great experience and we had luckily managed to distribute the rest of the donations we had left to different schools, playgrounds and also singularly to every children we would meet on our way. But after more than two months it was time to face reality and understand that the borders were not going to open any time soon. We decided to resort to a very expensive way of “escaping” the country and that was by sending our trucks with a cargo ship.
Although we were sad to leave this beautiful place we promised our selves that we would come back as soon as possible with a new plan and a new mission. What new plan? You will just have to wait until we announce it!
Stay tuned!
