Alexis Okeowo

A few weeks ago, I was in Senegal. I was invited to participate in a reproductive health reporting project with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, in which three other American journalists, four accomplished reporters from Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa, and I attended a family planning conference and talked about, among lots of things, men, women, and all the complicated side effects of sex in Africa.

Here are two dispatches from my time there: about a controversial H.I.V. and contraception study and about the roots of the resistance to abortion. Dakar is stunning, by the way. There is a stretch of highway in the city that is bordered by palm trees, the beach, and the ocean, and that literally looks like LA.

Photo by Jake Naughton