Excerpted from my piece in Muddy Backroads: Stories from off the beaten path
Madville Publishing, March 2022
Purchase book here
In my mind, Africa was idyllic. I had spent a semester in the big-sky, red-earth country of Kenya two years earlier and now wanted to return for a more authentic experience that wasn’t printed on the pages of a tourist brochure. I wanted time for soul-searching, like Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard, trekking western Nepal looking for a wild cat and grieving the loss of his wife to cancer. I also wanted to disappear, to hide from the job of living the truth. Secluding myself in the wilderness of the Sahel, the broad arid swatch of land south of the Sahara Desert, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, seemed like a good way to do that. I had no delusions about Third World Development. I knew I wasn’t going to save the world, but still I did expect to go to Niger, lead a simple life in a Niger village, make a small impact, and figure own my own shit out along the way. Only nothing turned out the way I expected it to.
Mark Lammers 