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Hey! I served in Peace Corps Mali from 2010-2012, in San, about a "5 hour" drive straight west of Yako. We were Peace Corps neighbors   punk rebel ecks posted:I actually want to visit both Ghana and Burkina Faso. Are they good places to visit in terms of sightseeing and a Hunter Thompson-esque adventure? I don't want to hijack OP's thread but man Ghana seriously is one of the best West African countries to visit if you are an English speaker. Relatively well developed, the travel infrastructure is cheap & comfortable, the people are as awesome as any West African country and it has some really cool stuff to do & see no matter where you go. The food is real drat good too and to this day I dream about watching a street food vendor pull a kebab off the fire and dust it in hot-smoked pepper powder until it had a crust of it like fried chicken. Fart Car '97 fucked around with this message at 22:36 on May 19, 2020 |
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May 19, 2020 22:30
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The_Continental posted:MY MAN! That's amazing. Did you ever make it down to Bobo-Dioulasso? There was a PC Transit House there that was known for some pretty epic dance parties. Technically I crossed the border once while out hunting with my neighbors, but I never officially visited Burkina 
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May 20, 2020 00:52
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The_Continental posted:That might qualify for most PC rules broken at one time. I imagine you were on a moto, with a firearm, crossing an international border, possibly drunk, and not wearing a helmet? Yes to all but drunk. Despite living in an area where drinking was commonplace & accepted due to heavy christian/animist presence (Mali is 98% Muslim), I didn't drink at site out of respect for my host family who were Muslim. But it was at like 2-3 AM.
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May 20, 2020 01:02
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The_Continental posted:
gently caress this reminds me one of my favorite days of all my service. There was a broken solar pump in our village that had been built by Germans and long abandoned. It was behind a locked fence. After just staring at it for years my host dad just stood up one day, rounded up a few guys, some bolt cutters, saws, and other tools and we just cut the lock on the fence and tore the thing apart and distributed the panels among the village.
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May 20, 2020 02:21
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Outrail posted:You touched on this already but without being gross did local woman see you/other western workers as a catch or novelty conquest? A 'Catch' in the sense that anyone growing up impoverished in a developing country would consider marrying a Westerner with means a 'catch', sure. "Novelty Conquest" would have been almost non-existent from a Male volunteer's standpoint. The idea of a woman initiating an encounter & sleeping with a male volunteer for fun would have been really uncommon, especially at a more remote site. Premarital sex isn't uncommon at all (in fact, many West Africans have just as many premarital partners as Americans, they just sleep with them in a much smaller timeframe), but it's also not discussed publicly. It's in secret and if it's bragged about, it's to close friends only, and the onus is almost entirely on the guy. In West African countries it's much, much more common for female volunteers to date male nationals, and the male national is almost always going to be one that's well educated, of means, and from an urban center. You can develop incredibly strong relationships with folks at your village, but there culture & knowledge gap there is much, much larger there than it is with the nationals who grew up well educated in a bigger city. Plus, the Female volunteer isn't expected to provide for her partner nor is any expectation of marriage put on her. That stuff is all on the guy. The guy in a relationship pays for everything, takes care of everything, and is expected to arrange the marriage. Even moreso if the guy is a westerner, which puts male PCVs in a weird place in terms of dating locals. Fart Car '97 fucked around with this message at 15:58 on May 20, 2020 |
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May 20, 2020 15:52
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The_Continental posted:Yeah delving into this a bit deeper. When people of think of "sex tourists" they normally envision some chubby white neckbeard in Thailand. I found that in W. Africa there were lots of middle aged French, Belgian, German, and Dutch women who had hired strapping young local "guides". These guys would take them on moto rides to the desert and make camp, and ultimately be paid for sexual services. The typical horrible western white sex tourist is very much alive and well in The Gambia
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May 21, 2020 01:39
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Randarkman posted:I mean if you're actually in a country that's really hot with intense sun (especially one nearer the equator where you've got proportionally more UV light) actually wearing a brimmed hat when outside isn't such a bad idea, especially if you've got light skin. Don't necessarily know if fedoras are all that suited though(some sort of wicker hat would probably be good). People give you all this advice about what to wear in the heat but in reality what you wear is a mix of whatever 'outdoor' clothing you brought with you and whatever scraps you found at "Dead Toubab" stores, which sell the all the old western clothes donated to the country. I found the advice people gave about black/long sleeve/headwrap ect was kind of meaningless because it's really only effective when it's getting really hot outside and at that point you just don't do anything in the sun anyways. The real reason you wear long sleeve shirts is because the sun feels like needles on your skin when it's pushing to 115*F. During the 'hot season', when temps would reach 110*-120* daily (hottest I ever saw on a thermometer was 125F/51C), your day looks like this: Wake up at 4am-5am, eat breakfast, go out and do whatever field work you can until around 9-9:30am. At this point the sun is cresting the treeline and all the men retreat to someone's house and sit in the shade napping/drinking tea/reading/visiting until around 4pm when the sun gets low and you can go hammer out another 2-3 hours of work before it gets dark. Meanwhile the women are up before sunrise and work all day long regardless of the heat because they're the real champions. Big Edit: The_Continental posted:Given the communal nature of a lot of towns, crime was pretty low. There are of course assholes everywhere. A guy I know was on a bus and the road was blocked by bandits. They fired some shots in the air and the had everyone get off the bus, lay down, and they robbed people. The police arrived and did nothing to de-escalate the situation, and a shoot-out ensued. I wanted to expand on this a little bit because this was also my perspective on crime until I returned to Mali to live there as a freelance journalist for a year after my service ended, then it completely changed. Crime is certainly low in the rural parts of West Africa, but the big cities are a completely different story. While crime wasn't rampant per se, it was a part of every day life and you had to take active measures to avoid it. I would say it was much less safe than pretty much any developed-world city. Here are a few crime stories. Most of us drove motorcycles to get around and we called 11 p.m. "the witching hour" which meant you either went home or committed to leaving your moto where it was for the night, because the hijackings started around midnight. The common MO for hijackers was to have 2 people on a moto, one with a gun or a bludgeoning weapon and one driving. They would drive up alongside the target moto and force them over if they had a gun. If they had a bludgeon they would usually just cream the person from behind and then the passenger/bludgeoner would recover the (now crashed) moto and drive off with it. 1) During my service we were at a bar on a major avenue in Bamako and witnessed a motorcycle hijacking right in front of us as we stood out front smoking cigarettes. This time they had a gun and had driven up next to a guy on a moto and were pointing the gun at him. The victim wasn't loving around and slowed down just enough so that he could ditch the moto, then just lept straight up, landing on his feet at a full sprint to stay upright. The moto kept going with no driver before falling over a few yards later and skidding out. The guy didn't stick around, he just ran the other direction to get away from the hijackers. Meanwhile 10 yards from us these two guys, one with what looks like a cowboy-era six shooter, pick the moto up and drive off. 2) I had a French acquaintance who was quite cocky about driving his moto at night, despite everyone repeatedly advising him not to. Well one night he was riding home at late and he was the victim of a hijacking. Thankfully his assailants were the 'bludgeoning' type and he was able to push them off him while they tried to force him over. He was able to take shelter with some guys manning a shop on a street corner, where he waited for about an hour to cool down and for the coast to clear before heading home. But the hijackers were just watching from a dark alley nearby, and this time they weren't loving around. As soon as he got back on his moto they came up behind him again and just clobbered him on the back of the head. He was pretty seriously hurt with a minor concussion from the blow and a knee injury from the crash that left him in a brace & crutches for about 2 months. He garnered little sympathy from the expat community, basically everyone just said "We told you so". 3) It was around 3-4 a.m. and I was heading home from a show in a Taxi, which I was sharing with a Malian woman. Her dropoff was first. When we get to her neighborhood she asked the driver to turn off the main drag into it. It was was most of us would consider a slum. After a few blocks the driver was visibly uncomfortable and pulled over and said he wasn't going any further and told the woman to get out. She seemed to understand and left without a fuss. We made a u-turn and as we were driving out of the area 2 guys on a moto began riding alongside the driver'a window asking where he was going. At one point the moto-driver reached out and placed a hand on the taxi's window-sill. The taxi driver very suddenly popped his door open and kicked it outwards as hard as he could, hitting the moto and causing it to careen off the road and crash in a ditch. He slammed the gas and sped away. I asked what the hell that was about and his response was pretty simple: "I am a Taxi driver. Nobody asks me where I am going. I ask where YOU are going. Those men were going to rob us." I took his phone number down and he became my main driver from then on out. Plus plenty of 'non-story' incidents. My house was broken into a few times. Muggings of westerners were fairly common if you wandered away from the front of a bar/club at night. Volunteers especially had a false sense of security when in the 'big cities' because their sites were so safe. It wasn't until I lived in the city myself that I began to understand how pervasive crime actually was. Fart Car '97 fucked around with this message at 15:34 on May 22, 2020 |
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May 22, 2020 14:50
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Cannon_Fodder posted:I'm catchin' up with the thread, but I watched this first-hand. OP mentioned that what you describe is pretty common in Ghana/Senegal/ ect, but that's just sex tourism not unlike going to the Amsterdam. There's nothing really illegal going on there, and they aren't really hot spots for child sex tourism. The Gambia on the other hand is notorious for being a destination for Europeans to engage in child sex tourism. Child sex & slavery is more common in Senegal/Mali/Ghana/Sierra Leone/Liberia than most countries for sure, but it's usually occurring between nationals. They aren't destinations for it in the same way The Gambia is. The Gambia has just the right mix of development, economy, access, and a corrupt government that allows the worst poo poo imaginable to thrive.
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May 22, 2020 19:17
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 02:56 |
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Cannon_Fodder posted:When I said "first-hand", I meant, they walked past me and I witnessed it. Sorry, I guess I'm confused because it sounds like what you're saying you witnessed 'first hand' is the very common, out-in-the-open transaction where older white women travel to West Africa to sleep with young well built black men while acting as their sugar momma. I don't really care about that, everyone involved is a consenting adult. If you saw the other end, where older white men are travelling to Gambia to sleep with kids, then I'm sorry you had to see that
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May 22, 2020 21:32
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