The brilliant orange glow of the West-African sun shone majestically across the vast Senegalese landscape, warmly kissing the farmlands of its expanding plains-enveloping cities,fingering edifices & neighborhood streets with its rays-flinging shafts of light into homes,offices,mosques & recesses visited recently by the cold shadows of night. Out again intothe desert plains, pausing to glance at reflections of its glory shimmering in the winding,sluggish rivers of the Sahel-gracing all the land with its joy. This was a new day!

And so it was for the small provincial town of Matam, a settlement of ten-thousand inhabitants whowere now waking to the first blush of dawn. The rays of the morning star chased across the saffron-coloured plains,bounded over the Senegal River before landing cheerfully into the homes of the town's now wakened residents.

Now can be heard the repetitious sounds of the women pounding-mothers & daughters pounding, engaged in the tedious task their kinswomen for generations have been occupied-the feeding of their households. Women pounding & grinding,grinding & pounding-pounding away at the millet, the corn & groundnuts that were to make the meal to feed their families for the day