This is fun. I got 35. Beat that. Liz showed it to me but she could not beat that.

I haven't made it all the way through this yet. What I've read so far is great. Dad, you might want to pass it along to Mom (and Leah, since she doesn't appear to spend much time here anymore) (both of whom are also returning to Liberia after a long time away).

Quoted: I was going back, finally doing something I should have done a thousand different times since that night, May 16, 1980, when my mother, my younger sister, Marlene, and I got on a Pan Am flight at Robertsfield and fled the place that my great-great-great-great-grandfather helped found.

Quoted: Because of him, I would not grow up, 150 years later, as an American black girl, burdened by racial stereotypes about welfare queens. Nor would I have to deal with the weights of a sub-Saharan African girl, with a life expectancy of about 40 years, yanked out of school at 11 to fetch water and cook over a coal pot and rear children barely younger than herself.

My friend Ben is there as an election monitor.

Quoted: Voters in Sierra Leone go to the polls to elect a new president, five years after the end of a civil war.

Dad, I thought you'd like this story about fixing a flat with limited resources in West Africa. (Others might like it too)

Quoted: Some Ghanaians, including Abusi, have returned home from abroad especially for the anniversary.

"Everybody is happy, there is a big sense of unity, ecstasy, enthusiasm, national sense of pride," he told the BBC.

"People are really, really happy, full reconciliation across the party lines. Everybody is just welcoming the 50th anniversary."

Quoted: Delegation to promote baseball arrives in Ghana.

Interesting story on airlines' global expansion - (Delta is leading the way back to Africa), plus some great Pan Am nostalgia.

Quoted: I'm sure today you can stumble across examples of Pan Am's famous blue globe -- faded, peeling and streaked with rust -- on abandoned trucks and ground equipment in Monrovia, Abidjan, Nairobi and elsewhere.

Quoted: Love them or hate them, airlines are more than corporations. They operate, in a sense, as de facto ambassadors.