BY ALEXANDER KNETIG, SCIENCES PO, SPECIAL TO THE MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

Carera always rents a donkey from his friends

A lonely man is crossing the Savannah in his wooden horse cart, hand-painted in red, yellow and green, the national colous of Senegal. In this wide emptiness burned by the torrid Sahel sun, his unhurried whistling is the only sound one can hear within a radius of several kilometers.

Albert Carera left his hometown of Louga three hours earlier to amble slowly to his farm, located near the River Senegal more than 300 kilometers north of Dakar, close to the border with Mauritania.

Despite his primitive means of transport, the 54-year-old Carera is not a poor man. He is a landowner, thanks to money his relatives have regularly sent him from the United States and Europe. But he represents a new chapter in the old story of immigrant remittances, one built as much on tradition as modernity.

Since 1995, when western money transfer systems started operating in Africa, remittances have reshaped the continent and enriched companies like Western Union, whose first agencies in Louga opened in 1999. Western Union's main global competitor, Moneygram, followed in 2003.

Today, the whole town is full of advertisements offering money transfer services, reflecting the fact that this city of barely 100,000 people has become Senegal's emigration capital. More than half of its population is living outside the country, making Louga extraordinarily profitable for global money transfer agencies.

BY MAKIKO KITAMURA, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

Click on picture to enlarge

Momar Ba is back where he began, with little more than a harrowing story to share. He is alive but still desperate. He has traveled from his native Senegal to Germany, Switzerland, Tunisia, and most recently, Spain's Canary Islands, each time hungry for work.

The father of eight children, Ba saved up $1,200, selling used refrigerators to pay a smuggler. That allowed him to join about 20 other Senegalese in early September on an eight-day boat trip from Dakar to the Canary Islands.

"I was willing to sacrifice my life to get on that boat to go to Spain," the 34-year-old Ba said in his apartment in the working-class Dakar suburb of Parcelles Assainies.