Menik is the language of the Bedik people, and is spoken by approximately 3,000 speakers in 21 small villages in southeast Senegal. In 2018, I launched a project together with my Bedik colleague Tama Christophe Keita to collect, transcribe and illustrate a total of 162 traditional tales, legends and other oral texts in the Menik language. The end goal was to create a book with all the texts and distribute the copies among the Bedik people. In doing so, our project aimed to satisfy two long-time needs of the Bedik people: on the one hand, to help preserve their precious oral heritage, whose transmission was threatened amidst the drastic changes of modernization; and, on the other hand, to support the Menik literacy programs by creating the first comprehensive book in Menik. In fact, the Bedik oral heritage needed a physical medium to survive, while the Menik literacy programs have suffered from a pervasive lack of reading materials from the beginning.

In 2021, I received the 'Language Legacies' grant of The Endangered Language Fund, which provided us with funds to collect the last 66 texts, print the copies of the book in Dakar and distribute them among the Bedik people. The book is called Ɓecësal and it contains stories from 110 storytellers and 35 original illustrations by the artist Angela Moreno. The copies were successfully distributed by Tama and myself in March 2022 and were welcomed with fascination by the Bedik people, who see the book as a great opportunity to keep promoting their language and culture. Many Bedik that have participated in the project were proud to see that we kept our promise in delivering the book and were captivated by the 500-page publication entirely written in Menik language. The distribution of the book sparked a renewed will to learn how to read and write in Menik. Now, I am working on a new project that will employ former Menik literacy program teachers in the creation of a moving Menik literacy school.