Not getting any travel postcards? This project in West Africa delivers delight — and a lifeline.
The guides know there’s a whiff of the mystical around their city, and “they enjoy showing people that it’s a real place, with real people, with interesting things happening there.”
It’s not often that Phil Paoletta receives disgruntled emails about his and Ali Nialy’s project, but when he does, it’s because someone thinks their West Africa-based company is a scam.
The duo started Postcards From Timbuktu in 2016 with a mission to help unemployed tour guides gain an income by sending cards from a city that’s become shorthand for a far-flung, if not imaginary, city.
“They think Timbuktu isn’t a real place and we’re printing fake postcards and stamps to make it seem like something’s coming from a place, in a joke,” Paoletta said.
It then falls to Paoletta to explain that Timbuktu is, in fact, a real city in Mali, that the person who wrote the message is not a grifter, and that one of their friends or family members ordered a postcard for them thinking they would enjoy receiving correspondence from Mali.
More often than not, though, the recipients of the postcards are delighted, especially because the pandemic has brought much of international tourism to a halt.
“We had a lot of postcards for people who were stuck in quarantine and wished they could be traveling,” Paoletta said. “This way, at least, they have a postcard that traveled all the way from Timbuktu.”
The idea for the project came the same day Paoletta, an American hotel and restaurant owner in Bamako, Mali’s capital city, received mail from a friend in the United States — his first parcel in six years. He was thinking about how delightful it was to receive the letter when Nialy came to visit him.
Nialy had been a Timbuktu guide who once made a comfortable living walking tourists through his hometown, bringing the fabled city to life with visits to mud brick, earthen mosques and museums that show the history of the once-important trading post. But after Islamist militant occupation and attacks in 2012, tourism went into a free fall. The next year, the French military intervened and conditions improved, but numbers dwindled further after a series of suicide bombings in 2015 and lingering insecurity.
Now the top half of Mali is all but divorced from the southernmost half, at least for foreigners. Even if Paoletta, who has lived in Mali for a decade, wanted to visit Nialy, he’d be turned around by officials before he got to Timbuktu.
As Nialy explained how dire the guide industry in Timbuktu had become, the idea for their venture clicked for Paoletta.
After a successful test run to determine whether a postcard from Timbuktu would get to its destination in other countries, they assembled a team of ghostwriters and set up a website. The process for ordering a card written and postmarked in Timbuktu is fairly simple: pay $10, dictate the verbiage, and choose a design.
Some of the photos on the cards are shot by Paoletta, others are gifted by professional photographers, and some are public-domain historical pictures of Timbuktu. Alternatively, the sender can opt to have a design colored by kids at the local elementary school. From there, one of the unemployed guides hand-writes the message (usually in English, German, or French) and off it’s sent.
On average, the cards take two or three weeks to arrive, but there have been exceptions. The biggest problems Paoletta and Nialy have encountered is an inability to track the postcards. Once they’ve been dropped off at the post office, they have no way of knowing where in the world they are. Still, they’ve had very few complaints.
“We’ve become so accustomed to ordering something and being able to track it down to the meter,” Paoletta said. “But these cards go on long, unpredictable journeys. It’s surprising and nice that people seem to accept this timeline.”
Only once has someone asked for a refund, after several months had gone by without the postcard’s arrival. But when it eventually arrived six months later, he sent the money back via PayPal.
“That one has an insane story,” Paoletta said. “The Portuguese post office conducted some kind of investigation on the card. I don’t know the reason, but eventually the card was delivered — by the police department.”
The wording for the myriad dispatches have spanned the spectrum. Some people write love letters, some try to fool others into thinking they’re actually traveling, and some send cryptic messages anonymously. Paoletta said they have even witnessed family mediations via the team’s handwritten letters. Passive-aggressive notes, presumably, hit differently when they’ve come from a city on the edge of the Sahara desert.
Nialy and Paoletta have also received myriad orders from fervent postcard collectors — a community called Postcrossing has been particularly supportive of their project — and have a roster of regular patrons who don’t request a certain memo but instead ask the writer to share information about themselves or their day, creating a one-sided pen-pal system.
Writing the cards also allows the duo to continue sharing their city with others.
“I have the feeling that I’m doing what I like the most, which is tourism, even though the context is different,” Nialy said.
Paoletta echoed that sentiment, saying the guides know there’s a sense of the mystical around their city, and “they enjoy showing people that it’s a real place, with real people, with interesting things happening there.”