California Girl

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California Girl

The World Vision was dependent on donations.

To get donations, you must let the potential donors know what you have done with the funds they have entrusted to you earlier.

Therefore the Office had a whole section devoting it's time to reporting.

Reporting means taking pictures.

Our media specialists were in the Regional Office in Johannesburg.

Will you express much surprise if I tell you that our media specialist were Americans and that our best photographer was beautiful blonde from California?

Are you sort of guessing what is going to happen?

I do not think so.

At that time we were working in two teams, one in Mbuji-Maji, the capital of the Zaïre diamonds and of the smugglers and everything that was rotten in Zaïre. The Mbuji-Maji team was in charge of setting up a refugee camp. This was a very different job from ours, they were not growing food, they were distributing food to refugees.

One of my colleagues from M.M. was a young American man, you know like the boys coming to your door and wanting to tell you the truth about Jesus. He was totally clean.

No swearing

No Cheating

No drinking

Total faith.

And a virgin.

How he managed to keep away from the claws of the girls, I cannot imagine. Each week he was receiving letters from his girl-fan club, from all the girls he had met during his missions, girls who had recognized in him the ideal future father of their children. Yet he was reading their letters with a kind of innocent pleasure, even showing us the press clips they had sent him, apparently totally unaware that he was a choice prey.

So here we were on the road, coming back from a visit to a farmer, on our way to the airport.

The World Vision had a major problem, the Banks in Lubumbashi were totally inactive, they were fully staffed but would not handle any money transaction. The World Vision needed a lot of dollars in Zaïre to buy the food for the refugees in Mbuji-Maji. How do you solve that problem?

They choose the most courageous solution, the one I had never even dreamed of proposing.

Our Californian photographer girl was given a belt carrying 60.000 dollars and she flew into Lubumbashi. How she could accept to do that, I cannot understand. It is true that her entry had been arranged at the Airport but if any Senior Police Officer had been more greedy than wise, he would have got himself 60.000 dollars and a beautiful blonde Californian girl who was probably worth even more than 60.000 dollars on the sex market.

So here we were on the road to the airport and suddenly, as I was dreaming he says to me:

<< you drive, I pray >>

I thought he was joking, praying to God for his assistance to smuggle 60.000 dollars, but no, he was totally serious.

We arrived at the airport, as agreed she was the last one to get out of the airplane, she was guided through customs, like all of us, and here we discovered that beautiful blonde Californian Woman carrying 60.000 dollars in her belt and 10 kg of photographic equipment on her shoulders.

And we were to discover how tough a Californian beauty can be. She was the most courageous thing I have ever seen. But I am a professional coward.

She was taken to the Hotel, had a brief shower, had no time to eat and one hour later she was out in the bush, in a hut, talking with a woman farmer while the small babies were dosing, taking hundreds of photos.

As the process appeared to be a bit lengthy, I continued my farm visits.

About 5 kilometers further I came to a small village just near the main road, and I saw, next to the farmer I was visiting, an old woman, lying in the sun, at the opening of her hut.

As I was wondering at what she was doing, they explained that when an old women farmers had nothing left to eat, to sell, to hope for, they would just lie out in the sun until they died of ..... dryness?

We drove back to town, bought food, gave her food, gave the neighbor food to give her and then went back to our photographer.

And in a way it changed all my way of looking at the world, here we had a sophisticated young women born on the sunny side of life doing her job to convince rich people to give more to grateful farmers while 5 kilometers away an old woman was dying of the lack of everything, in total indifference.

What was I doing in this show?

The food I had given the woman would make her survive one week.

What was the point?

Well, let us end on a happy phrase.

From that day, he was like a man who has seen God, and he had.

They got married within two years.