entrails market

I've met this man.
French, ex mountaineer, ex rugby player, ex UN consultant...he WAS many thing.
Now he's an old man living in Nepal since decades in the countryside, with a Nepalese girlfriend.
I guess that at a certain point of his life he gave up his body and stopped to take care of what people think about him.
His arm was cemented in a solid block so that, to put sugar in his coffee, he had to move 3/4 of his body. After an accident he lost some parts of bones between the elbow and the hand.
He had some bolts in a foot and other in a hip.
But also he had long nails, oily hairs, yellow teeth, huge fat body and he was spitting while speaking.
Not knowing how NGO are working, he was asking for some funds to run a small project in his area. AHAH! I don't have a dime!

Anyway, he was also an engineer, and he followed the construction of a new private clinic in Kathmandu, and he told me about a new profitable business catching on in Nepal.
In the new shining expensive ultra equipped clinic there were something like 50 beds and 11 dialysis bed.
A not insignificant ratio.

"It's a new form of tourism"
"What. For people with kidney problems?"
I knew a lot of Europeans use to go to India to visit a cheap dentist or to North Africa for a plastic surgery, probably also dialysis is too expensive in some countries.
"Not dialysis, no...but kidney are"
"Oh, no"
"Oh yes! At the end of the works, they offer to my crew, all poor skilled workers, a free kidney visit"

But he had no idea how much a kidney can cost. To the clinic to buy and to the 'tourist' to install.

Football match goats against human in the countryside 

Europeans are crazy

At certain point looked like we were selected to participate in a kind of 'world wide water project championship', organised by a private foundation and one of us was invited to go to Europe to assist at the awards ceremony.
We decided to send the engineer.
God, he was exited. He was so exited that driving in the Savanna and speaking about is next trip, we got completely lost, in time and in space.
But obviously at the end, after hours driving having as only reference the Kilimanjaro down there, we found our way back to the camp and Simon did not loose his flight toward north.
Everybody envy him, but did not want to admit it.
So someone was murmuring that the water project wasn't so spectacularly good, and others that had to be very cold in those days in Europe and there was not better climate than the Tanzanian one. "Dry season is so good for the skin".
But when Simon came back, with a fancy and sporty new jacket, and an horrible and huge and heavy copper trophy, all of them were around him, the brave engineer who actually managed to go out from Africa, expensed.
And he past like seven full working days to explain and tell about this so called First World.
I was thinking he was impressed by things like traffic lights at each crossing, elevators in each building, dust bin in each sidewalk, pine scented toilets, tunnel through the mountains, women in high heels carrying the fat fruits of their abdomen in a stroller and not in their backs, but the storyteller, the water engineer, was fixed on that point: from the aqueducts they do not have water, they have BEER!

Someone in a bar just served him a draft beer.

His name is not actually Pedro. A Masai leader  

The man who raped a chicken

I had this friend. Ben.

A big South African serious and funny at the same time.

Even if he was born in SA he pretend to be a Dutch, but the way he was drinking beer and talking about the African Governments left little room for doubt about is real origin.

He came to Tanzania from South Africa by car to take up a two months job, and when I met him, he was in Arusha since 5 years.

He was curious, passionate about technology and extremely suspicious. He was one of this exhausted white thinking that in every man was a thief. He made this IT Company and the guy working for him used to go around visiting the client by motorbike. Well, Ben put a GPS in each motorbike and then he used to monitor constantly where his workers were. And if a motorbike stopped where it was not supposed to, or taking a suspicious way, Ben was calling the astonished guy, like he was the Big Brother or a kind of minor God.

But as a friend he was fantastic. Always present when you need him, always ready to move his connections to solve a problem and, at the end, very proud of himself when able to help a friend or solve a situation.

As a good South African, he LOVED to organise barbeques with tons of different dead animals, and his speciality was the “Raped Chicken”: open a can of beer, take a chicken (already dead and plucked) and ‘sit it’ on the beer. Salt, oil and spices on the skin and then on the barbeque, cover. When the beer in the can is finished, you will have to most delicious chicken ever.

He also had a very strange sense of humour. More than strange I would say overly bastard. If you accidentally left your mobile unguarded, even for a single second, on the bar table or in the jacket pocket, he took it and start to send embarrassing messages to whoever in the list. Your boss, friends, other’s girlfriends, providers.

When it was possible, he preferred to send those messages from and to people in the same room, to spy secretly the reaction and taking reason for intimate fun.

Once, at 4 in the night, a message woke me up. It was from my boss, the one I deeply dislike. “I feel horny, please meet me now. I won’t tell anybody”.

“Fuck Ben, I was sleeping...”

Then I lost him: he moved first to Dar es Salaam and then he got a better job in a security company in Nairobi. I moved to Haiti and then to Nepal.

The other day he was chatting with my spouse: he was getting back to South Africa soon to get married.

This morning I received a mail from a common friend: That night Ben was shot eleven times in his house in Nairobi by a bunch of robbers.

I hope they did it quick.

What people want to see of Africa