MAURITANIA The country has begun fortifying food with vitamins and minerals, a cost-effective way to save lives.  TAKE an American student and an American teacher who have never been near Africa before, lead them on a crazed “win a trip” journey through five particularly wretched countries, and what do you get?  Well, a few mishaps. There was that angry mob in Mauritania — who would have thought our cameras would upset people that much? And that bull elephant in Niger was equally inhospitable, although the giraffes seemed amiable as they approached to gawk at the strange white humans.  We encountered plenty of heartbreak, like the baby we met in Niger who was going blind from lack of vitamin A. In some places, we felt the gnawing disquiet of insecurity. The rise of banditry and a Qaeda network in West Africa forced us to take an armed escort across one particularly lawless stretch of “highway.”  Yet my travel buddies and I also found something far more significant on our journey: hope. One of the best-kept secrets in the world today can be found in thatched-roof villages like the ones we passed through: Africa appears to be turning around.  After a half-century of underperformance, Africa’s economy is growing significantly faster than America’s or Europe’s. In the last decade, 6 of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world were in sub-Saharan Africa, and, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton noted in a recent speech in Ethiopia, that proportion is expected to rise even higher in the next five years. The global economy has turned upside down: Europe risks imploding, while much of Africa is booming.  This was the fifth “win-a-trip contest,” in which I take a student with me on a reporting trip to the developing world. This year I also chose someone from the over-60 crowd. The student winner was Saumya Dave, a medical student from Atlanta, and the older winner was Noreen Connolly, a 66-year-old teacher from a Catholic school in Newark. Neither had ever been to Africa, and they proved wonderful travel companions, cheery even when I explained why not to leave food on a bedside table in a hotel (I once awoke to gaze into the eyes of three rats) or when Saumya came down with a fever that we feared might be malaria (it wasn’t). There was only one experience that my winners balked at: a villager in Burkina Faso asked for Saumya’s hand in marriage.  Our odyssey began in mid-June. Accompanied by an Atlanta photographer and videographer, Thomas Nybo, and armed with everything from satellite phones to mosquito bed nets — all jammed into tiny bags so we wouldn’t have to check luggage — we flew from New York to Casablanca, Morocco.  Morocco is a window into one of the most striking trends in Africa: democratization. The number of electoral democracies in Africa has risen to 18 from 4 in the last decade, according to Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington. Even in a country like Morocco, which is still a repressive monarchy, easing has occurred. It has freed some political prisoners, moved to strengthen its Parliament a bit and even established a truth and reconciliation commission.  This is how Saumya Dave experienced Morocco:  "On that first morning, we met a reporter who introduced us to protesters who had been beaten and arrested.  "The protesters were young, outspoken, rebellious, headstrong — and endearing. They answered all of our questions with ease, insisting that the efforts already made by the king were superficial, only for show. They were also fearless.  "'We get beaten in school and by our parents all the time,' Imad, one of the protesters said, a grin emerging. 'So being beaten by the police is nothing.'"  From Morocco we flew south to Nouakchott, the sleepy capital of Mauritania. I had been a bit disappointed that no pro-democracy protests in Morocco or Mauritania coincided with our visits — but we did stumble across a melee in Nouakchott. Its target: us.  A Mauritanian host took us to the open fish market, and we strolled through. Suddenly a very large fishmonger grabbed Thomas, outraged by the camera dangling from his neck, and suddenly dozens of others were milling around us and shouting. One of our drivers tried to pull the man off Thomas, and then fists were flying and our driver was suddenly in a headlock. We tried to retreat, and the original troublemaker let go of Thomas long enough to pick up a huge wooden pallet and attempt to smash it down on our vehicles. Fortunately, a policeman rushed over and helped us escape, and we never figured out quite why this tumult had happened. A fluke, I think.
An American student and a teacher discover that economies are growing, more girls are in school and gains are being made in nutrition.