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.
MACONA CEO Mariam Williams and a volunteer packed three bags of donations and loaded them into the car in Maryland. Inside: clothing for women, girls, and boys, food, over-the-counter medicine, feminine hygiene products, and shoes, sneakers, and sandals. GPS trackers ride along inside the bags so we can see them at every land stop.
On the road to Philadelphia, the trackers checked in from Interstate 95 near Elkton, Maryland, about 72 miles out. This is exactly why we ride trackers inside every shipment: you can watch the donations move in real time, not just take our word for it.
The bags reached the Philadelphia warehouse and were handed off for loading into the container bound for Mali. Trackers reading strong before the container is sealed for the ocean crossing. From here the trip to West Africa can take about three months, which is why overlapping shipments and steady donations matter so much.
Two weeks after the Philadelphia handoff, all three trackers pinged together at the Port of New York and New Jersey, the busiest container port on the East Coast. MACONA-TKR-2 checked in along the New Jersey Turnpike in Linden at 8:13am, and MACONA-TKR-3 surfaced right at the Elizabeth marine terminal on Newark Bay, container yards all around. This is the last checkpoint on US soil before the container is loaded onto a ship for the Atlantic crossing to West Africa.
After 25 days of silence at sea, MACONA-TKR-3 pinged at the Tanger Med container port in Morocco, on the Strait of Gibraltar. Ships bound for West Africa often stop at large hubs like this one, where containers are moved between vessels. At first, only 1 of the 3 trackers reported. We guessed the other 2 were inside a container that had not been opened yet. See the next update.
It was only a matter of time. A few hours after the first ping, MACONA-TKR-1 and MACONA-TKR-2 showed up on the same Tanger Med quay as MACONA-TKR-3, and all 3 checked in within 1 minute of each other. All 3 bags are accounted for, 3,821 miles from where they started, and still together. One honest note: MACONA-TKR-1 is now reporting a low battery, so it may go quiet before arrival. The other 2 will keep reporting. The next stage is the port of arrival in West Africa.
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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