Sitting in the 4WD bashing our way through the Tunisian desert, I put my essentials in a purse: my phone, credit cards, keys. Which I bury deep in the bottom of my bag. For the next seven days I’ll be trekking through the Sahara with ten Poles. What is ‘essential’, I notice, is rather different here.

Dave Keetch writes: The French version of Al Jazeera was on the television so I was only half paying attention to it as I sat with Hajar’s family in their home at Tiznit, Morocco. It was the news ticker that caught my eye though. “Mauritanie” scrolled across the bottom of the screen. I then caught [...]