Virginia Friends of Mali

Hello everyone, Today we met King Kanga Assoumou of Bassam after spending a wonderful day and evening at the beach. The King proved to be very welcoming and seemed very happy to receive us. We were even given a local drink to taste! Everyone is having an amazing time and we all look forward to keeping the good times rolling as we move on to Mali! Thanks for checking in on us, Taron Ware

Friday May 23rd I write these notes as I lie back on a student cot in Yamassoukro, the official capital of Ivory Coast that has the world's biggest cathedral: an exact copy of St Peter's Rome, except that is it one yard bigger ! We are all in this extremely smart National Polytechnic Institute created by the first president of Ivory coast, Felix Houphouët-Boigny, bringing American students to see how the Africans study and how might it become possible to establish exchange programs between Virginia and West Africa. This place is very prestigious and it therefore has literally dozens of international partnerships. We have been brought here to a Grance Ecole show-place, to meet the elite of Africa! The private engineering + business college we are visiting in Abidjan, AGITEL, offers more scope for concrete VCU partnership, because it has none in USA until now. The same is true of Bamako and Segou universities. And since all their students want to learn English, the offers a...