Charlene Pidgeon has been a good traveling buddy in West Africa for over 10 years. She and I shop together for our respective African Art businesses. She has been actively raising money for Nomad Foundation projects that she manages for much of this time. They include a major goat purchasing program which has served especially in times of famine and war, women’s co-operatives in both Niger and Mali, a Tuareg artisans center at Fatouma, Mali. Her latest help has been in sponsoring the Solar panel project. Her efforts funded the purchase of the plane ticket for Dr. Komp. She was forced to cancel her planned trip north when we decided it was unsafe to go. When she discovered how much our costs increased with the transfer of the project to Niamey and we had to pay for the transportation of our 18 students, their housing and food, she chipped in with the funds to cover the increased costs. Thank you to all the supporters of Charlene’s projects, she is a devoted worker to help the nomads in West Africa and we are very grateful for her hard work, and her conception and management of projects for the Nomad Foundation.
Charlene is an expert in African Textiles–here she is in our favorite melefa store at the Grand Marche in Niamey with Abdoulaye Diallo, the Nomad Foundation’s representative in Mali.
We look forward to the next exciting project she has decided to take on: a medicinal plant garden at the Tamesna Center to help supply our health clinic there. We will soon publish details of her projects on the NOMAD Foundation website.
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