My son Andrew was a Peace Corps volunteer in the West African nation of Burkina Faso; when he was there, his siblings and I visited him. As with all my maps, most of the decorative elements have special meaning: here, the border echoes a Tuareg woven cloth from the region; the directional arrow is punctuated by a mask I bought in Burkina; the thin black-and-white bull lived in Andrew's mud brick courtyard; the saying in the ribbon line, transliterated from Arabic, means "God grants us another year," a common Burkinabi salutation, made more poignant by the country's short life expectancy. Finally, the trompe l'oeil envelope tucked into the lower right corner represents the many letters Andrew wrote to us during his two Internet-deprived Peace Corps years.