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This is Mohamed Aguissa. He is writing messages on postcards and stamping them with our "Tombouctou la Ville Mystérieuse" stamp that Ali had custom made in Timbuktu (the official postmark stamp comes from the post office).

Prior to 2012, Mohamed sold jewelry made by his father and served as a tourist guide for visitors to Timbuktu. After the multiple crises of early 2012, he fled with his family to Burkina Faso where he lived in a refugee camp in Djibo for 2 years.

Since returning to Timbuktu, things have not been easy. His family gets by, but...

Some of you have already ordered the new hand drawn postcards available on the site. 

I wrote a bit about the backstory of these postcards over on my blog. You can check it out here. 

We've been fortunate to have a few stories written on the project, resulting in a boatload of postcards being sent to Italy and Spain. The most recent article, a piece in Voice of America, has led to orders from the United States to Uruguay. 

This project will do well with a wide audience, and these articles go a long way to making that happen. If you appreciate the project, you can still get the word out with a simple share on facebook or the like. Thank you to everyone that has already done so. 

Here are some articles that have been...

Well, we have released a whole bunch of postcards into the wild. They arrived at the Bamako Post Office early this morning after a convoluted journey through the north of Mali. 

The clerk at the Timbuktu Post Office was quite confused when Ali showed up with a stack of postcards (this post office doesn't see much activity these days), but he quickly jumped into action. The two of them went through the postcards one by one to determine the postage and to put the Tombouctou stamp on them. 

After more orders rolled in over the weekend, Ali...

Postcards are printed. Stamps are ready. The clerk at the Timbuktu Post Office has plenty of ink. Let's see what happens!

For a bit more about this project, I wrote a blog post over here.