I met Akbar on the beaches of Cotonou, Benin in West Africa. He was selling jewelry. I asked him to sit and offered him a cold drink. I asked him about where he was from. He had travelled south into Benin from the Sahara desert in Niger. He called himself Tuareg, a culture of desert nomads. I asked him about the markings on the bookmark i had just bought from him, he told me it was written in Tifinagh and it was the markings of his family and that he missed his 2 children very much.