Kevin Warfel
Kevin is a linguist by profession, having worked with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (www.sil.org) for more than 30 years. He leads Rapid Word Collection workshops to help members of minority language communities all over the world collect words to begin work on a dictionary of their language. You can read more about that at RapidWords.net.
Kevin began collecting old American coins in his early 20’s as he encountered them in circulation. A few years later, as he became active in a coin club, a fellow member encouraged him to take an interest in foreign coins. When he moved to Burkina Faso in 1990, he found vendors in the local market who had African coins and began to grow his collection. Soon, however, those vendors began to offer him African currency, which Kevin knew nothing about, having never even seen a catalog for world currency. Research during his next visit in the US changed that, however, and Kevin returned to Burkina Faso armed with photocopies of pages from a friend’s catalog.
Kevin’s personal collection focuses on French West Africa (FWA) and the West African States (WAS)—no surprise since he spent 19 years altogether working in that part of the world and still returns there from time to time. He was mentored by Weldon Burson, who helped him make sense of the WAS portion of the paper money catalog, educated him regarding the grading of currency, and eagerly bought previously unknown WAS letter/signature varieties that Kevin turned up—something that happened on approximately a dozen occasions. Kevin bought many banknotes during his stay in Africa, keeping the best ones he found to upgrade his personal collection and selling duplicates to fund this passion. Currently, his FWA collection comprises more than 200 different city/date/signature varieties and his WAS collection includes well over 1000 notes, each of them with its own unique combination of denomination, code letter, date, signatures, etc.
Contact Kevin Warfel
Email: AfricanPM@yahoo.com
Phone: +1.704.776.6270
eBay Store: stores.ebay.com/banknotes-direct-from-Africa
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