The African story

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Malbork Castle, evening.

Now that I know the gipsy story, how they ended up here in the Northern Poland Lake District, waiting for the European Union borders to open up once Poland will join this big European economic powerhouse, keen on their part of the dough, social money free of charge and the respect of outsiders they mostly despise...

So now I really like to get the background story of the two dozen or so Africans living on this badly mantained camping in old tents, taking turns on sleeping time and spending most of their time, when they aren't doing odd jobs for nearby farmers, on the camping drinking Polish beer and chewing grass that reminds them of their native QAT...

Five of them inhabit an old army tent near the lake. The sour acid smell originating from the low bushes surrounding their tent betrays me their territorial pissing spots...contact is easily made, a bag of Polish Tyskie beer does it all though conversation mostly abstract due to language barriers...

still, I get my stories, Mashmour from the highlands of Tigres, his skinny frame hidden in a oversized army trench coat with German marks, has taken the route from Jemen to Turkey before bussing through Eastern Europe and has been here nearly two years now, the crazy sparkle in his beady black eyes convince me is serious mental case, maybe suffering from a war trauma...

Abdullah from Sumalia and his childhood mate Hussein wanna know all about Dutch women and their chances of marrying blonde s*x bombs with too much money in the bank, possessing the magic hand in the kitchen and serving them ice-cold beer from a real fridge...their erotic fantasies surpass even mine but then they have been out here for eightteen months...

Mehmet is the yougest of the group at seventeen working in Malbork as a dishwasher that brings in the rent money for the tent, a self-conscious boy who avoids my sketchbook and drinks no beer...

The fifth member of this party is not African but Russian and though caucasian of origin the flesh of his face still visible under the massive gray beard, is so suntanned he might well be African too. With a voice hoarse from a life time of heavy vodka boozing, using bad German, he claims to be an emotional refugee from the brute Russian regime occupying his Siberian Kingdom, where Russian governement officials kidnap local women to their Moskou dasha hide-outs, sending them back to their native Siberian villages pregnant.

Stories of African dusty villages with no access to clean water and Russian s*x brutality in Siberia invade my ears untill late....tomorrow I'll be on my bike again.

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Photos

Vladimir
from Russian controlled Siberian

Mashmour
from Africa