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Ghana- How I Met John [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-08-01
John is my minister friend who does charity work for the very poor in Ghana. I have been writing about him and I apologize for yet another diary so soon but Tuesday is my day to write Ghana updates and yep, today is Tuesday!
Right now John and his friend Okra are busy preparing for a major show in Accra. John is very involved in the underground music scene there and he performs frequently in a venue close to where he lives. He and Okra are going to have a show in Friday to showcase the local young performers. Everyone is very excited. So that is the current news.
I thought I would tell something about how John and I met and our early days. I do not know the year, and the photo above is not the oldest he sent me but I had a hard drive crash some years ago and this is the oldest I have. I would guess John was in his mid-twenties at the time it was taken.
I think John and I met through one of those old Yahoo groups. It’s so long ago that I don’t really remember the details, to be honest.
Back in the Wild West days of the internet starting up a conversation with a total stranger was easy. No one was afraid of everyone else on the net and on their profile pages on Yahoo there was a link to show if you were online. If you were, anyone looking at the page could send you an instant message through Yahoo chat and there you were.
Sees impossibly innocent now but this was before all of the bad things came out about the dangers of being accessible online and I have to admit it was fun, though most of the people one wound up chatting with were not really very interesting.
At any rate, I was a member of many sports groups and some metaphysical and spiritual groups at the time and I think sports was our common interest. The problem was that John’s main sport was football (soccer) and that is one sport I know little about, but we hit it off and started discussing other things too.
John was studying just about every religious and spiritual belief online and we had some very deep discussions about them. (John was something of a Buddhist at the time and he still meditates every morning.)
John was living in the Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana and he told me about that and about why the people were there. People had originally fled from the civil war in Liberia but they had lived there long enough that their children had grown up there and intermarried with Ghanaians . They didn’t want to leave.
At the time the authorities were trying to get the refugees to go back to Liberia but there was nothing for them there. Shortly after John and I began to chat the government actually bulldozed part of the camp, including where John was living, and made the people twice refugees. (I actually looked this up on the news at the time and yes, it did happen.)
John was always far too open and told me things he probably shouldn’t have, considering that we didn’t know each other very well at the time. He told me some appalling stories of how people online had treated him.
One person tricked John into masturbating online for him and then posted it publicly and insulted him and ridiculed him for it.
Another person literally tried to get him to emasculate himself online and said if John would he would take care of him for the rest of his life. Fortunately even John was not that naive. Or desperate.
One older an in Australia offered to pay the way for John and one of his friends to go and stay with him in Australia. John’s friend did go and left his own little son behind. The old man then turned against John and refused to talk with him again.
I assume this was an old pervert who basically bought himself a young African man to have sex with. It would have been very difficult for the young man to refuse, considering he had made himself totally dependent. (And to be fair, it may well be that the young man was perfectly willing to be kept in this way as a means of getting out of Ghana.)
What happened to the little boy he left behind I don’t know.
I was appalled by these stories, as anyone would be. That was when I took John under my wing, to protect him from predators. Besides, I like John.
If anyone thinks that the internet is only sinister African scammers abusing poor, innocent white people I have news for you. It goes both ways.
I don’t want to make this a too long/did not read thing so I will stop here but this is the basic story of how we met. Sorry if it is a bit raw but sometimes the story needs to be told.
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