The day that changed Tengo's life
True Story ...
Hello Hello to everyone in the biggest country in Africa.
I am back again but this time we are venturing to another West African country that is Gabon.
This is an article written for the #novemberinleo writing prompt series and Day 20 prompt ....
My experience of this prompt could be called eye opening ☑️
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#novemberinleo day 20! What's an experience that made you restructure your mind?
Drop your posts on the community Hive Naija 🇳🇬!
What sort of mind writes these Hive Naija prompts!?! I forget who, maybe I wish I had paid them more attention!
My life was about to change
When I was 23 I managed through a friend who was already there to get a job as the terminal projects process engineer in Gabon, West Africa.
Little did I know when I got to London Heathrow airport that I was really 25 as far as Shell the oil company knew. Yes my friend and our agent had blagged to Shell about my age 🤣
So began possibly the most eye opening three months of my life that would forever shape the character I became.
We worked 5 and a half days a week, getting Saturday afternoon and Sunday off.
It is safe to say I was an animal. Party hard etc but I had a blast and the local villagers loved me. So began my love affair with some things African.
One weekend I decided with another couple of guys to go up into the jungle via boat.
When I say Boat it was a dug out wooden log with a little outboard motor on it. But it floated!
We had decided to make an overnight trip and had packed beer and water, you know the essentials of jungle living. We also had hired one of the local camp chefs who said he knew the lakes and go take us upstream to see real life.
It was a mental wee trip, we almost got sabotaged before we started.
That part of Gabon was pretty remote back in the day and we had wildlife galore and this is where the nickname Eddie Wildlife came about for various reasons...
I digress, to get to the lake we went past a bend in the river called hippo bend. No surprises for guessing that it is a bend in the river that is a popular bathing spot for those frightening big hippopotamus animals.
Did you know that they are the biggest killers of humans in Africa (excluding the dreaded mosquito). They are bloody territorial and that bend was theirs and theirs alone.
Well back to the story, and we were chugging along in our wee log (not that wee, just thing a long log) and the next minute whooosh came a fluffing water fountain rocking the boat and up popped the head of a big ass hippopotamus. I mean fuck me that head was huge and so close to me, I could have touched it I swear.
But I don't know if just a warning, as it made no attempt to capsize us, so on we went.
It was getting dusk now and you know it gets dark quickly when it wants to.
Our guy said there was a village of a handful of huts up ahead that he thought we could spend the night.
Turns out he was a bigger bullshiter than me. He had never been up this part of the lake at all! Nor was the chart / map he had up to date!
We start to glide into the shore and look for a spot to moor. Two canoes almost identical to ours were berthed half in the water half on the mud of the shore.
We sailed in and crunch our guy had hit a boat, not a problem thought I as boats in the water just move together so to speak.
The next minute this little Gabonese man in what I will desribe as a loincloth and bare chest came storming out of a hut, speaking some langauge I had no clue about.
I speak French and it sure as hell was not French!
So him and our guy are shouting at each other. They go to inspect the boat. I then heard our guy swear in French.
Oh fluff me thought I, and went to investigate. Turns out that one of their boats was wedged against a submerged rock. So when our guy came sailing in, he trapped their boat against that rock and it cracked.
He was fuming the little man. He knew as were white that we must work in some capacity for Shell.
So away he went and came back five minutes later dressed in a white Shell oil company t-shirt. In one hand he was holding a battered leather briefcase and in the other hand a bloody rifle.
Now the other two were shitting themselves again. Funny how bravado vanishes in the cold sober reality of trouble.
I started to speak French to the little man who turned out to be the village chief, I offered him a beer and sat sipping Regab the local beer. After two Regabs he had calmed down and I offered to pay for damages or buy anything he was selling.
By this time some of his family came down to see the three whitemen in the canoe.
The girls were topless well all females were. He introduced me to his two wives and we all proceeded to get drunk.
They even butchered one of their chickens. Something I found out later on was a huge honour as it was a big eff producer.
We got talking and I was now fluent French speaking in my head. The children didn't goto school.
He showed me his briefcase, it had a piece of Shell headed paper and a blue pen in it.
It was what he was given by Shell to allow pipelines to be laid on his land if necessary.
It wasn't but that was his first and last time seeing white men. He was not impressed.
The kids were all happy and smiling. They had nothing and were dressed in rags.
Their job for the day was to help make sure the family had food for that day.
I had never seen anything like it.
Here were Gabonese people who had nothing, yet were giving what little they had to people who had basically sunk their boat and sunk their method of transport and sunk one of their main methods of catching food.
I really was flabberghasted and got to know them all really well.
Over the next two years I would bring them clothes and toys for the kids.
I spent many a night with them and was treated like a King, something I could not get them to stop doing.
In the end I sponsored a boy and a girl through school and university. The girl is now a Doctor in Paris and the boy a taxi driver in Marseilles.
It changed my life that little trip.
In the west there is no comprehension of real poverty. We can always get food or shelter, it might hurt our pride but we can get it.
There, they had nothing and could get nothing unless they got it. There were no handouts.
It was pure poverty. The huts would be damaged in the rains, the furniture made from salvaged wood.
It was an eye opener and forever changed my outlook on life.
No matter how hard you think your life is, there is always someone somewhere who is worse off that you.
So count your lucky stars you are alive.
Thanks for visiting and I hope you enjoyed my response to the prompt.
Sources and Reference documents
This article is an entry for this month's Inleo writing initiative #novemberinleo
You can find all the details in this thread
Today's prompt is Day 20 | What's an experience that made you restructure your mind?
All ramblings are from me, the mad Scotsman TengoLoTodo unless otherwise stated, note lead image is generated with AI on pixlr.com from a prompt by me. Any other photographs are all orginal and taken by me the author.
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