What Took You So Long Foundation

In Nouakchott we visit doulos Community, a Christian NGO and one of the more successful small NGOs operating in Mauritania. doulos has been working with the poor of Mauritania’s emerging capital since its foundation in the mid-1980s, when a small group of inspired young American students decided they could no longer ignore the plight of Mauritania’s urban migrants.

Andrew Dymock, a soft spoken Englishman who currently heads up the team, tells us how doulos has changed over the years, from being a charity primarily providing aid in the form of hand-outs to now providing community development through collaboration with local leaders and organizations. But from its inception doulos has remained true to its philosophy of community integration, to understand and address the issues facing the poor by living amongst them.

We are also privileged to meet with Karen Boyle, programmes director of doulos and one of the original students at Princeton University (US) who helped establish the organization. Her dedication is inspiring. From the ease in which she carries herself in this challengingly poor environment to her interaction with locals, she embodies the spirit of doulos and is an example of how accepted a foreign, Christian woman can be in the deeply conservative and Islamic communities of Nouakchott.

In Arafat district we visit schools and private and communal farming projects doulos and their partners have initiated and helped fund. Seeing mature woman learn basic numeracy was especially touching. Learning to count is so fundamental to our lives, from buying and selling to remembering the telephone numbers of loved ones, it is hard for us to comprehend not knowing how. Often in our rush to address seemingly bigger, more complex problems, we overlook the little things that mean the most to a community.