Walking with Abel (Riverhead Books, 2015) is a book of nonfiction that follows a family of nomadic Fulani cowboys and its cattle for a year-long cycle of transhumance. It is a lyrical story of survival, perseverance and adaptation of one nomadic family’s traditional lifestyle in an increasingly globalized world. The Fulani’s annual pilgrimage on the oldest plateau of the world’s oldest continent reenacts year after year human peregrinations from the time when we first walked the semi-deserts of Africa. It is the story of our common journey, and I need your help to tell it. I am inviting you along to make truly communal the book that explores the mega-narrative of all of our human migrations, our ancestral restlessness, our shared hejiras.

All contributions matter: even the smallest footsteps propel us forward on the road. Some contributors will receive copies of the book when it comes out, acknowledgments, and other mementos from our unforgettable joint passage. For the $3,000 donors I will cook a traditional Sahelian dinner.

Anna Badkhen writes about people in extremis. She has lived and worked in the Global South most of her life and has reported from a dozen war zones on three continents. Badkhen is the author of four books, most recently, The World Is a Carpet (Riverhead Books, 2013). Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times, Guernica, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, In These Times, and other publications.