“Kalli!!” I bellowed into the hangar like a man casually requesting tea after detonating a hand grenade in the living room. Kalli, blissfully unaware of the incoming catastrophe, was wedged under the cowling of a Cessna 172, elbow-deep in what I could only assume was mechanical witchcraft involving the nose wheel. He looked up, squinting like a mole dragged into daylight.“Do you have some yellow duct tape by any chance?” I asked, as if that were a standard request in a facility dedicated to keeping planes airborne and not held together by stationery supplies.

“BILL!!” I screamed, my lungs operating well outside warranty, the sound slicing through the cockpit noise like a mayday call from a pilot who just realised he’s been flying the manual for a toaster. “Let’s do another round! I need to learn this! NOW!!” We were ripping down the runway at fifty miles an hour—on one wheel. One. The tail was kicked skyward like it had been possessed by the Lucifer himself. The right wing was flirting with the asphalt, nearly peeling it off like a cheese slicer on a bad day. I was having the time of my tumultuous, ill-advised life—blasting down the runway on one wheel in a flying deck chair from hell, utterly unaware this level of airborne lunacy was even legal, and fully convinced we were auditioning for the airshow spin-off of Jackass: Aviation Edition.

“What do you mean by, ‘Honey, I just bought an airplane’?” Nicole stared at me like I had just sprouted a third eye and offered to fly us both to Hell in a homemade hot air balloon. Her expression landed somewhere between cardiac arrest and righteous homicide. If I’d told her I was Elvis reincarnated with a side gig in necromancy, it might have gone over easier. Up until that moment, she had been clinging—desperately, delusionally—to the idea that this whole “Africa situation” was just a passing phase. A midlife tantrum. A chaotic mirage that would vanish like a suspicious wire transfer in a Nigerian inbox. But now? Now she realised, with the chilling finality of a guillotine blade, that this wasn’t a phase.

“Enrico,” I mumbled like a love-struck, deranged Othello revival crashing into a midlife aviation crisis, “you can’t be serious. This thing—granted, it has a certain deranged charm—can’t possibly fly. And even if it does, how could it fit a pilot, let alone a passenger? It’s minuscule. It looks like the unlucky offspring of a kite and a lawn chair after one too many drinks at an ultralight convention. If IKEA built planes, this is what they’d send you—flat-packed with two screws missing and a manual written in Swedish sarcasm.”

“Tell me again, please, Marcel—how this is even remotely a sound plan. Seriously—walk me through the logic, step by step—because I must’ve missed the part where you got kicked in the head by a zebra.”  Shlomi’s voice, sharp as a lawyer’s letter and twice as judgmental, crackled through the line with the crisp authority of someone who had actually survived Africa—unlike me, who was about to treat it like a casual DIY project. I could practically hear his eyebrows folding into origami swans of disbelief.

“Listen, Marcel!” Shlomi took a deep breath, the kind a man takes before delivering news so devastating it might as well come with a condolence letter. I braced for impact, already wondering if it was too late to fake a medical emergency or hurl myself out of a conveniently placed window. “You see, don’t let this rub you the wrong way, but… you are useless.”

“No, Marcel, I don’t believe sending your designer clothes here is a great idea, really. All that would accomplish is giving the customs officers a wardrobe upgrade. By next week, half of Nairobi’s airport security would be strutting around in your Armani suits like underpaid Bond villains. Meanwhile, the black market—where 95% of all donated Western apparel ends up anyway—would be absolutely thriving, selling your well-intended generosity at a tidy profit. Your wardrobe alone might trigger an economic boom, possibly even a hostile corporate takeover of the secondhand clothing industry. But would a single orphan, a single starving child, a single soul in actual need ever touch so much as a thread of your donations? Absolutely not.”

“Are you ready? Sure you want to do this?” Shlomi asked, with the casual tone of a man inviting you to brunch, not a descent into the rectal cavity of urban despair. I looked at him—unsure, unprepared, and utterly incapable of backing down. Why? Because if I did, this bastard would hang it over my head for the rest of eternity like the Sword of Damocles, except less sword and more insufferable smugness.

“Damn you, Shlomi! May you wake up stark naked at the bottom of a festering hippo pool, gargling elephant dung like it’s mouthwash, sprouting a rat’s tail from your forehead, and cursed with a baboon’s ass so blindingly red that traffic stops out of sheer confusion! May every mosquito within a hundred-mile radius see you as an all-you-can-drink buffet, and may the local witch doctor take one look at you and immediately request an exorcism!”

How One Camera, One Ghetto, and a Herd of Ungrateful Elephants Bankrupted My Wallet, My Sanity, and Any Hope of a Quiet Life. Let me take you, dear reader, on a rollercoaster ride so violently absurd that even the most masochistic thrill-seeker would rather take a cheese grater to their own kneecaps than buckle in. We love stories of meteoric ascension, don’t we? The kind where some dirt-poor underdog claws their way to fortune, clutching designer sneakers, overpriced watches, and a crippling cocaine habit along the way. We worship the Silicon Valley demigods, the rags-to-riches pop stars, the socialites who manage to monetise their own existence with the sheer force of vapid entitlement.

"No, Marcel, I don’t think it’s a good idea to get off the hood now and step into this lion pride." I could tell my wife was a bit concerned. She had a point. It was darker and quieter than a postal office after closing time, and our fragile Land Rover was perched on the edge of a valley so ominous it might as well have come with its own horror soundtrack—something with unsettling violins and distant screams. For all we knew, a colony of prehistoric carnivores was lurking in the underbrush, just waiting for us to stumble down there like an all-you-can-eat special. If a family of T-Rexes was holding a reunion in that valley, we wouldn’t know until we were on the guest list—as the main course.