This Week From Africa 24.4.26

This Week from Africa

Bringing Us Back to Who We Are

We left Djifère and sailed deeper into the Saloum. The first night, we anchored in front of a lodge that had built its bar around an old cannon. Through the dark, huge fishing nets kept passing by, almost from one side of the river to the other, keeping us awake for most of the night. The next morning, Nike flew the drone and spotted a jackal that seemed far more interested in our dogs than in us.

A few days later, after sailing further into the delta, we spent a full day with around fifty children on one of the islands.

After all that trash on the beach in Djifère, that mattered to us.

Nike has been doing plastic recycling with her NGO, In Mocean, and we met a man who was genuinely interested in hosting a workshop. So that is what we did. The children collected bottle caps, cleaned them, shredded them, melted them down, and pressed the material into molds. What I liked about it was its simplicity. It was not another clever conversation about what people should do. They could actually see waste pass through their own hands and become something new.

Of course, one workshop will not solve the plastic problem in the Saloum.

The next day, there would still be rubbish in the water. The shore would still carry what people and tides had left behind. And still, the day mattered.

I think that is what stayed with me most.

Not the idea that we had changed everything. We clearly hadn’t. But the way we acted upon it felt right. We had seen a problem, and instead of only talking about it, we had done something small and real.

Maybe that is why the day touched me more than I expected.

Because I know that feeling from other parts of life as well. You see something that is not right. In your work. In your relationship. In the way you have been living. And you also know that one conversation, one decision, one good day will not fix the whole thing.

That is often the moment when people drift into reaction mode. They function. They manage. They carry on. They do what has to be done. And slowly they lose touch with themselves.

Maybe that is why I care so much about this kind of work.

Not because every action changes the world. Most don’t. But because small, honest actions have a way of bringing us back to who we are. They remind us that life is not only about solving everything. Sometimes it is about being on the right track and not losing yourself in the middle of it.

I think that is true in coaching too.

A lot of people are not broken. They are just tired of reacting. Tired of running on expectations, pressure, and everything they think they have to be. From the outside, life may still look fine. Inside, something important has gone quiet.

And often the real question is not: how can I reach a goal or destination?

It is: who do I want to be while I am living through it?

The workshop did not clean the whole village. It did not solve the bigger problem. But it pointed towards it, and I am still glad we did it.

Because for that day, what we wished, thought, said, and how we showed up were the same. Congruent.

And maybe one day we look back and realize that is what happiness is about.