I had a farm in Africa…

This is one of my personal stories. It’s a true one, as all my writings are. And it relates to an adventure that I had back in the late 1990’s when I lived in Massachusetts. And at that time, I was able to buy a farm (in Zambia, Africa), staff it, and set it in motion using the pitiful amount of money that I collected and saved from my “day job” as an engineer.

This is the story of that adventure.

Some background

At that time in my life, I was living with a girlfriend in Wrentham, Massachusetts.  She was African-African. Meaning, of course, that she was not a hyphenated African-American woman, but a real, honest to goodness traditional (and lovely) African woman.

She was a traditional, conservative, family-oriented girl, and we both “hit it off” and got together great! In short order, don’t you know. We were living together.

She was a lovely woman, and both of my parents absolutely LOVED her. She was kind, sweet, intelligent, and practical. She also had a “rocking” body.  She had the most beautiful eyes and lips that I have ever experienced, and her skin was so soft… as were other parts of her magnificence.

And she could cook. OMG! Could she cook!!!!

I have never tasted steak the way she made the steaks. They were absolutely amazing.

Zambian steak.

And she treated me like a king, too. Formal sit down meals, and she would dress up just to be at home. Multiple healthy dishes. Real meats, with breads, cooked fresh vegetables, and desserts. Almost every day.

Saturdays were the day of house cleaning, and she kept our place spotless. My God!

We lived in a little cabin on Lake Pearl. It was rumored to have once been the home of Helen Keller. But I don’t know this for sure.

Lake Pearl in the Fall.

It was a rural and rustic location. It greatly resembled a scene from the movie “On Golden Pond”, and my many cats loved that environment. And you all should know, that Massachusetts is very, very beautiful.

We lived outside the town, and it was a little cul-de-sac that ended on a hillside bluff that overlooked the lake. It was tucked away and secluded. It was very woodsy.

Busy downtown Wrentham, Massachusetts.

We had a wood burning stove, an open kitchen, a little bedroom, and a great view of the lake. It was one of the most memorable places that I have ever lived, and to this day, when I remember those days, they are filled with the fondest memories. I consider those days… my “salad days”.

A house in Wrentham, Mass.

How it came about

We were eating in a diner, as we tended to do when we were washing our clothes in the local laundromat. The diner was down the road in Plainville, it was named “Don’s Diner” and my regular meal at the time was country fried steak and eggs.

Don’s Diner

The meal was something like this. And I would eat it with a nice cup of coffee. (My girlfriend really hated my habit of standing up to leave, and then (while standing) take a final sip of coffee. She thought it wasn’t gentlemanly.)

Country fried steak and eggs.

And of course, the food… well, it was delicious.

At the time, we were talking about (one of her) older sisters back in Zambia. Her (sister’s) son had just graduated from an agricultural college and was looking for work. He got great grades and had a real “nack” for farming and animal husbandry.

So we go on chatting away, and somehow the idea materialized that we could set up an egg farm. Her family had some land growing fallow, and he had the knowledge, and her other relatives had connections and all told, it looked promising. He could raise chickens and sell the eggs to the supermarkets and small stores in and around Lusaka, Zambia.

Lusaka, Zambia

What was involved.

At that time, the United States dollar could buy a lot in Zambia. 1 USD was equal to about 6000 Zambian Kwacha. Today the value is around 20.

Zambian Kwacha.

For a handful of dollars you could buy a bunch of apartments, buildings and land, and labor rates were insanely low.

So what I did was invested around $20,000 USD. (In gradual installments over time.) And ended up buying some land, hiring people to build some basic buildings and structures and allowing the relatives to set everything up. In this role, I was the financial partner, while my girlfriends’ family handled operations and marketing.

I owned a chicken farm in Africa.

And that’s the way life is.

When you see an opportunity, you take it with the resources you have, and give it all that you can. You try to be realistic, and hopeful, but you realize that many things can go wrong.

Getting it set up.

When you go into these kinds of ventures, you either commit fully or you walk away from it. You cannot be timid. You must commit.

As they say…

Consider a plate of ham and eggs. The Chicken was involved, but the pig was committed.

And so, I did my part, and provided the funding and watched the budget.

The entire system came together rather quickly and about 8 to 9 months later, we had a fully functional chicken egg farm (not for meat), we produced eggs and sold them. We had customers and some were large chain supermarkets.

Now, of course, the profit was small, and miniscule, however we plowed the profits back into the enterprise, and the operation grew and grew again.

Counting money.

And collapse.

Then something happened.

After about two years of operations…

No word or reports from our budding, young operations director. All was quiet, and we didn’t know what was going on.

One full month passed by.

When the family went over to investigate, they found the farm abandoned and the chickens starting to die off, and everything locked up and abandoned.

What we discovered, was that  our young operations manager was pocketing the profits, taking the investment moneys and pocketing all the profits and running up enormous bills.

Then he skipped town and went to South Africa.

!!!

We tried to hunt him down. We tried to  resolve things, and tried to keep the venture alone, but without him, and his skill set and everything else, we were forced to abandon the entire project.

We gave up hunting for him, and wrote the entire project off as a big failure and a lesson learned.

Lessons learned.

The big thing, and the big lesson, is that you really are taking a risk when you put a young person in charge of your operations without vetting them. And the employment of a relative is perhaps a compounding mistake that can make things go from bad to worse.

I hate to say this, but it is true. Many, but not all, young people seem to believe that there is an endless stream of opportunities ahead of them in life, and that they can jump from one to the other without consequence.

If they are in the right place at the right time, they do not appreciate the great nugget of opportunity that they have so early on in their life. They seem to believe that it is just one of a long series of gold nuggets.

Us older folk realize the truth.

The young African dream.

Maybe other opportunities came his way, but chances are that they didn’t. He had one great break early on, and like a typical 20-year-old, blew it all on the belief that bigger and greater things were in his future.

Like a shooting star, he shined bright and then dimmed into obscurity.

For me, I learned a lot.

Seriously I did.

And in the decades that followed, the many lessons continued. Many were quite painful. Almost all were financial failures, but I did end up meeting interesting people, going to strange new lands and experiencing life in broad brush strokes.

But, you know what?  I have no regrets.

For,  you must understand…

… I actually owned a farm in Africa.

Not the historical notion, but the real experience.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Happiness section here…

Why neocons are so adamant on maintaining proxy wars all over the globe.

This article connects hawkish neocons with outrageous theft of enormous amounts of money. They sponsor a war, people die, and they cart away pallet loads of money. This has happened time and time again, but few talk about it. But it’s a real thing, and it’s a real problem. Here we talk about it.

Executive summary

When there is a war, there is a great deal of confusion. The nation involved in the strife loses control of their assets, and the attacking forces live in a period of confusion. Funds, often enormous, are poured into the region, to help “stabilize” it. However, the fact remains that the funds, the moneys and all the banks in the disputed combat areas are all “up for grabs”. Thus offering an enormous bonanza for the people who are involved in the subjugation of a given region.

It becomes a wonderful mechanism for military leaders, and politicians, to become enormously wealthy within a short period of time.

War is a way for politicians to become insanely wealthy in a short period of time.

And as such, the United States has turned this into a racket.

The basis for this article

This article was inspired by another article titled; The case of the missing $6.6 billion. In which the author Bill Ardolino asked on June 13th, 2011 what happened to the billions of dollars in “humanitarian aid”, and “infrastructure investments” that the United States gave to Iraq to rebuild their nation.

He argued that Iraq still looks like a pile of mud huts with pot-hole filled dirt roads and a nation devoid of any kind of serious infrastructure rivaling that of before the Iraq conflict. He is right.

Iraq is a big mess with no obvious reconstructive efforts by any measurable degree. What happened? Where did the money go, and why are Americans still expected to pick up the tab?

Billions of dollars. Billions.

Pallets of US currency arriving in Iraq. Source: US Congress, House Committee on Government Reform.
Pallets of US currency arriving in Iraq. Source: US Congress, House Committee on Government Reform.

Q Chimes in

The Corrupt System Has Been Ripping Off the US Taxpayer                                                    
Q!!mG7VJxZNCI                           
24 Nov 2019 - 4:24:25 AM                                                
                                                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNqKhRcpktU📁
[16:00]
"Are we going to be sending massive amounts of money that simply goes into other people's [personal] bank account(s) [theft]." - POTUS

Who audits where foreign aid actually goes? 
Nobody.

Foreign aid > Country [X] > Personal Bank Accts [+US person(s) involved].

Think Iran.
Think Paris Accord [attempt].
Think All.
Corrupt system. 

Do you think [GS] is spending his own money re: push of radical viewpoint adoption? 

US TAXPAYER payments [aid] > directly/indirectly [GS] organizations? 

Re-read drops re: 'Foreign Aid'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2qIXXafxCQ&feature=youtu.be📁
[Listen carefully]

RETURNING POWER TO THE PEOPLE.
DRAINING THE SWAMP.
POTUS IS FIGHTING FOR YOU.

It's been a long time since we've had a non_corrupt POTUS who cares for the people, and not himself.
Q 

That’s “billion,” with a “B”:

After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the  George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much  cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year  that a new unit of measurement was born.

Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo  plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills.  They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other  flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials  believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time. 

This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing  the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite  years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot  say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash — enough to run the Los  Angeles Unified School District or the Chicago Public Schools for a  year, among many other things. 

And it’s not only the “humanitarian funds” send by well-wishing Americans and generous Congressmen, but rather the entire gold bullion of the nation in strife…

Gaddaf al-Dam recalled that in 2011, the Libyan state had approximately $600 billion worth of assets inside and outside the country, including $200 billion in bank accounts abroad, along with tons of gold and silver. Six years on, all of this has been plundered. "During these six years, not a single brick has been laid. The streets of the capital have no electricity, the water supply has been turned off, wages are not paid." Schools are not functioning. "This all a time bomb, and poses a threat to the future."
Gaddaf al-Dam recalled that in 2011, the Libyan state had approximately $600 billion worth of assets inside and outside the country, including $200 billion in bank accounts abroad, along with tons of gold and silver. Six years on, all of this has been plundered. “During these six years, not a single brick has been laid. The streets of the capital have no electricity, the water supply has been turned off, wages are not paid.” Schools are not functioning. “This all a time bomb, and poses a threat to the future.”

The post-invasion chaos in Iraq was severe enough that massive sums of money regularly went missing, the majority (is) thought to have found its way into the pockets of those Iraqis who were early to adopt dialogue with Coalition forces.

Some of it undoubtedly funded the insurgency.

American neocons love wars because they can plunder without consequence, and they can become enormously wealthy in the process. We are not talking about a nice mansion. We are talking about purchasing hundreds of mansions for one corrupt neocon politician.
American neocons love wars because they can plunder without consequence, and they can become enormously wealthy in the process. We are not talking about a nice mansion. We are talking about purchasing hundreds of mansions for one corrupt neocon politician.

In 2008, an Iraqi politician told the LWJ his positive assessment that the “major” corruption, the deals worth “hundreds of millions of dollars,” were over.

But he anticipated that the “middle to lower-level corruption will continue for a long time and will be a huge problem.” This was progress of a depressing sort, I thought at the time.

Last we heard, Iraqi's gold was all taken by the Americans already, immediately after the Iraq invasion.  The gold now was bought by the new Iraq army by selling the weapons they  received from American military aid. I'm sure ISIL would've preferred  to have those weapons instead of this gold.
Last we heard, Iraqi’s gold was all taken by the Americans already, immediately after the Iraq invasion. The gold now was bought by the new Iraq army by selling the weapons they received from American military aid. I’m sure ISIL would’ve preferred to have those weapons instead of this gold.

The lack of effective accounting controls in place to manage Iraqi use of funds, both oil receipts and international aid, was shocking then, and continued to surprise, despite noticeable improvements at the ministry and ground levels.

A relevant amount of corruption along the lines of baksheesh and “ghost soldiers” is culturally inevitable in Iraq, but the fact that individuals and organizations could steal that quantity of money is a big deal, and potentially very harmful to US security interests.

The lack of effective accounting controls in place to manage Iraqi  use of funds, both oil receipts and international aid, was shocking  then, and continued to surprise, despite noticeable improvements at the  ministry and ground levels.
The lack of effective accounting controls in place to manage Iraqi use of funds, both oil receipts and international aid, was shocking then, and continued to surprise, despite noticeable improvements at the ministry and ground levels.

It almost goes without saying that billions can buy lots of people, Kalashnikovs and IED components.

In fact, the best case scenario is that a number of Americans, Iraqi political figures, and Iraqi businessmen are merely living incredibly large off ill-gotten gains and pumping most of the money into the economies of Jordan and Dubai.

Fingers crossed.

Moon over Alabama adds his two cents…

 The Washington Post liberated some 2,000 pages of more than  400 interview transcripts and summaries from the Office of the Special  Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). The interviews  were with officials and soldiers involved in the war on Afghanistan.

 Reading through the three part series on the papers is depressing. The opinions and narrations of the insiders are, as could be expected, devastating:

 “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of  Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a  three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar  during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers  in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

 Since 2001 the U.S. has spent more than $1 trillion on Afghanistan.  Most of the money has flown back to 'contractors' in the United States. A  significant part, whatever bribes and corruption would generate, was  invested by Afghan officials in real estate in Dubai.

 In public, U.S. officials insisted they had no tolerance for  graft. But in the Lessons Learned interviews, they admitted the U.S.  government looked the other way while Afghan power brokers — allies of  Washington — plundered with impunity. Christopher Kolenda, an Army colonel who deployed to Afghanistan  several times and advised three U.S. generals in charge of the war, said  that the Afghan government led by President Hamid Karzai had  “self-organized into a kleptocracy” by 2006 — and that U.S. officials  failed to recognize the lethal threat it posed to their strategy. 

 Little of the money reached the common people of Afghanistan. Where  it did it was wasted on projects that Afghanistan will never be able to  sustain. The corruption is one reason why many Afghans tolerate or even  favor Taliban rule. 

- Some Truth About The War On Afghanistan 

The United States government responds.

Well, having the claim that neocons and the government are after gold and riches does not fit the narrative that those in power want to project. They want to keep on continuing with their plunder unabated. So they utilize “fact checking” organizations to validate their narrative (and they pay them handsomely, don’t you know.)

Here’s a link to their version of the story. Note that it does not address the lack of infrastructure growth, new public works, or anything that they infrastructure investment is supposed to create. All they do is say… “Nah. It’s false, don’t you know.”

And here is an expose on the story behind one such “fact checking organization”. Know who you are dealing with and what is going on, why don’t you.

Snopes

The history of plundering gold…

All attribution to JMBullion.com with this graphic.




Greatest Gold Heists
Greatest Gold Heists

A certain degree of error is expected and excusable in the circumstances of post-invasion Iraq.

But $6.6 billion-worth is not.

Soldiers can become enormously wealthy by plundering the banks of the land that they seize. They can also acquire all the money sent from home for humanitarian reasons and purposes. They can "pocket" it and build a couple of hundred mansions and hire security guards to protect their gains.
Soldiers can become enormously wealthy by plundering the banks of the land that they seize. They can also acquire all the money sent from home for humanitarian reasons and purposes. They can “pocket” it and build a couple of hundred mansions and hire security guards to protect their gains.

Links

SHTF and Related Index

The Tale of the Killdozer.
The use of technicals for genocide.
The Climax of the Fourth Turning in 2025.
2025 - the Fourth Turning Crisis - A nuclear response
Why are Americans so angry?
Evolution of the USA and China.
The grim future.
Is it clear enough for you?
SJW
r/K selection theory
Pictures of a gun-free utopia.
Link
Historically, how preppers failed during periods of turmoil.
Universal Background Checks
What is planned for American Conservatives - Part 2
What is going to happen to conservatives - Part 3.
What is planned for conservatives - part 4
What is in store for Conservatives - part 5
What is in store for conservatives - part 6
Civil War
The Warning Signs
Line in the sand
A second passport
Link
Make America Great Again.
What would the founders think?
The Ninth Amendment
How they get away with it
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Parable about America
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Democracy Lessons
We can no longer build. As we enter the Fourth Turning.
A polarized world.
America's sunset.
Asshole
Types of American conservatives.
America is no longer a nation. When you cannot enforce a border, enforce laws, and prosecute criminals, you no longer have a nation. America is no longer a nation. It might still be the remains of a once great empire, sort of like Rome was after the Vandals sacked it, but as a functioning nation, it is no longer. When you cannot enforce a border, enforce laws, and prosecute criminals, you no longer have a nation. I argue that the United States is no longer a nation. Forget about being a nation that follows the Constitution. Rather, I argue that it is not longer a nation in the crudest, simplest, and most primitive terms. What it is is up for debate. But, a nation... no it is not.
Lawless Nation.
A reassessment of American republican democracy.
A warning to the oligarchy.

Some prepper humor…

Nuke from orbit.

Articles & Links

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