Thomas Friedman: Life teeters on the edge in Africa

If I were giving you directions I'd tell you that it's the last stop after the last stop — it's the village after the highway ends, after the paved road ends, after the gravel road ends and after the desert track ends.

The day we came, April 14, it was 113 degrees — far above the historical average for the day, a crazy level of extreme weather.

The village chief gathered virtually everyone in his community to receive us, and they formed a welcoming circle of women in colorful prints and cheerful boys and girls with incandescent smiles, home from school for lunch.

[...] the men have scattered to the four winds in search of any job that will pay them enough to live on and send some money back to their wives or parents.

Tell these young African men that their odds of getting to Europe are tiny and they will tell you, as one did me, that when you don't have enough money to buy even an aspirin for your sick mother, you don't calculate the odds.

After a series of on/off droughts in the 1970s and 1980s, the weather patterns stabilized a bit, "until about 10 years ago," the chief added.

The soil was slippery and oily, and it would stick to your legs and feet and you would have to scrape it off.

Senegal's national weather bureau says that from 1950 to 2015, the average temperature in the country rose 2 degrees Celsius, much faster than anticipated, and since 1950, the average annual rainfall has declined by about 2 inches.

Libya was like a cork on Africa, and when the U.S. and NATO toppled the Libyan dictator — but did not put troops on the ground to help secure a new order — they essentially uncorked Africa, creating a massive funnel through chaotic Libya to the Mediterranean coast.

The less lucky find work in Dakar or Libya or Algeria or Mauritania, and the least lucky get marooned somewhere along the way — caught in the humiliating twilight of having left and gained nothing and having nothing to return t