Every MACONA shipment moves through five stages. Trackers ping while on land (Apple AirTags require nearby iPhones); during ocean crossings, the ship makes port stops in Spain, Morocco, the Canary Islands, and Senegal where pings often surface unexpectedly.
Every event is timestamped and photographed. As trackers ping new locations, new events will appear here. Tip: click any photo to view it full size.
Clothing, hygiene products, and over-the-counter medicine sorted across 5 shipping bags. 4 of the 5 bags carry Apple AirTags so we can see where they are at every land stop. The fifth bag is co-located and bundled with the others.
Two hours each way from Maryland to Philadelphia to deliver the bags into the container destined for Mali. Trackers pinging strong inside the warehouse before the container is sealed. Read the original handoff post →
Last confirmed pings before the container is sealed for ocean transit. 4 trackers all reading; bag inventory checked against the manifest.
After weeks quiet, the AirTags pinged again this morning as the container moved north through New Jersey: TT3 on the NJ Turnpike at Linden at 10:20, then TT4 in Elizabeth and TT-1 in Newark, all inside the Port Newark-Elizabeth complex. The container is staging at one of the busiest export ports on the East Coast for its ocean crossing to Mali.
Two trackers surfaced again at 09:57 in Brooklyn, New York 11231, clustered around Red Hook Container Terminal and New York Harbor. The June 6 screenshots show MACONA-TT-1 and MACONA-TT2 still active, confirming the bags stayed trackable after the move from New Jersey into the Brooklyn port area.
After six quiet weeks at sea, the container is alive on the other side of the ocean. Two of the four trackers pinged in Dakar, Senegal on the afternoon of July 17: MACONA-TT-1 at 13:34 along Avenue Félix Eboué inside the port district, and MACONA-TT4 at 13:49 near the container terminal by Rue HB-17. This is the West Africa landfall we have been waiting for. MACONA-TT2 and TT3 are still quiet — normal for AirTags with no nearby iPhones — and we expect them to resurface as the bags move. Next stage: overland from Dakar toward Bamako, Mali for distribution.
The shipment is moving. On July 23, MACONA-TT-1 pinged at 17:10 and MACONA-TT2 at 18:02, both on the N1 national highway at M'Bour, a coastal town about 80 kilometers south of Dakar. A third tracker surfaced a short distance away, which brings us to three of the four now reporting, up from two at the Port of Dakar on July 17. Two of the trackers are traveling together and the third is close by. The bags are roughly 3,994 miles from where they were packed in Maryland. The quiet fourth tracker should resurface as the bags move through populated areas. The next stage is the overland leg to Bamako, Mali, where MACONA distributes the clothing, hygiene products, and over-the-counter medicine directly to families.
The shipment has crossed into its destination country. This morning at 04:39, MACONA-TT3 reported for the first time on the entire journey, and it did so in Kenieba, a town in western Mali near the Senegal border. That means all four trackers have now checked in at least once. The night before, at 20:00, MACONA-TT-1 traced the road ahead through Kenieba, Tambaga, Kita, and Kati, the overland route that leads to Bamako. The bags are not at the final destination yet. They are in Mali and on the road, with the last stretch running toward the capital, where MACONA distributes the clothing, hygiene products, and over-the-counter medicine directly to families.
The bags have arrived in Bamako, the capital of Mali and the final destination for this shipment. Within a few minutes of each other this morning, all four trackers, MACONA-TT-1, MACONA-TT2, MACONA-TT3, and MACONA-TT4, reported from RN6, the main road that runs through the city beside the Niger River, each reading 4,548 miles from home. The bags were packed in Maryland on May 4, so reaching Bamako took about three months, across all of May, June, and July and into August. That is why continual giving matters: one shipment takes a full season to arrive, so steady, overlapping shipments are the only way to build real impact, and they run entirely on donations, both in kind and in dollars. Our volunteers in Bamako will now take possession out of local customs, then reconcile and sort every item before distribution begins.
Our volunteers in Bamako now have the shipment in hand. Every bag of clothing, hygiene products, toys, and over-the-counter medicine has been carried in from customs and staged for the next step. The work now is careful and human: each item is reconciled against what left Maryland and sorted for the two places it is bound for, a local orphanage and a center for people living with disabilities. From there the volunteers place the goods directly into the hands of the children and families who need them. This is the moment three months and 4,548 miles of travel were for, and it runs on continual giving, both in kind and in dollars, so that the next shipment is already moving while this one is delivered.
The most interesting pings are the surprise ones — the ship lands at a port we did not expect, the tracker lights up in Casablanca or Las Palmas, and we know the container is alive and moving. Subscribe to know when it happens. Ask a question. Tell us what you would want to see.
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For the price of a single cup of coffee or tea, you can help put food on the table for a child in Africa. $5, $25, or $100 goes directly into food, clothes, school supplies, and hygiene kits MACONA delivers on the ground.
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