Super Awesome Bear

In my previous post, Blinky die Blokman, I briefly mentioned that I had a couple of weird jobs in my day. At one stage I was considering taking a job as the bouncer on all the Kulula.com domestic flights – if someone got unruly in-flight, I’d tune them, “There’s the door!”

I jest, but looking at my resume, I think “Bouncer for Kulula” would’ve looked like one of the pretty standard entries.

This brings me to the landmines. At that stage in my life, I was between jobs and between women. Had just finished studying Journalism at the Rand Afrikaans University, and like most young men with a fire in my gut, I decided to hit the road, travel, see the world and write about it. Unfortunately, my total lack of cash (or anything to sell sans my body) was a bit of a hindrance. I would have to work to afford a fancy trip overseas (After all, I am more overseas than Baber) and then it dawned on me – Why don’t I just work abroad, I’ve seen other people do it. Thus the job hunt began.

For anyone who wants to work in another country, as long as the requirement is “Being-in-another-country” as opposed to “Having-a-cool-job” then the world is your big filthy oyster, waiting to be cleaned. I considered a lot of opportunities; au pairing in San Diego, operating ski lifts in Salzburg, Camp Counseloring in Minnesota, Housekeeping service in Brighton. I even considered becoming some sort of manwhore, but being raised in SA, that thought scared me. So many terrific options. I thought about jumping from job to job, season to season, hemisphere to  hemisphere and do this for the rest of my life.

That’s when I read about the jobs that the UN had on offer. Damn, they had a lot. And all over the world, from basic clerical duties to physical field work. Of course, being a huge movie fan, I romanticised third world countries. Time magazine, National Geographic, CNN, MTV – here I come!

I chose explosion recovery in demilitarised zones, and the closest one was Angola.

In January of 1996, a division of the Ukrainian Armed Forces were dispatched to Angola on a UN peacekeeping mission. It was basically a company of engineers, consisting of the 901 detached pontoon-bridge company, Staff officers, military observers, and of course the folks we learned to hate as well, the military police (but I’ll elaborate on them some other day, just thinking about them makes me mad). I think it was slightly over 200 servicemen and women, and the main task of the unit was the reconstructing of the country’s infrastructure, including roads, bridges and temporary pontoon-bridges over the rivers. The Ukrainians weren’t the only foreign nationals in the country at the time, but I ended  working with one of the Ukrainian squads and a Belgian peace-aficionado named Ludolf. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

Getting the gig was simpler than I imagined. There were about three security and background checks, two psychological tests, an IQ test and two interviews. I lied in my interview, I thought it best not to tell them that I was only doing it because it was a weird way of getting my jollies, instead I told them that I felt it necessary to make my contribution to help rebuild a country ravaged by war, and as a South African, I felt it my duty. They bought it. I shipped off. At that stage, I was kinda bummed that the detail could only last 3 months, anything more than that and we ran the risk of going a bit bonkers (Seriously, PTSD was a major concern – especially for a civilian with no basic training). It was roughly one month later that I was incredibly thankful it was only a short-term gig.

For the first two weeks we were housed in the UN barracks in Luanda. That’s where staff sergeant Dos Santos and Sergeant Camarinha trained us in the art of not-blowing-yourself-up, probing for mines, marking their location, and if necessary, digging the fuckin’ things up. We were 17 civilians from all over the world and we would be divided up into different groups and dispatched to different regions of the country. Ludolf and I got lumped together and we were assigned to the Ukranians. We packed our kit and headed to our camp.

Well, camp is a strong word, in fact, I wish it was a little more “Camp” – at least it would’ve been more comfortable. My imagination was obviously WAAAAY too polluted by films in my expectations of a mobile base camp. There was a Mess facility, a few vehicles (including some APCs – awesome!) a few big tents, makeshift showers, toilets and a fence surrounding the perimeter and two fancy guard towers.

We were in it now, so we got on with it.

Now I’m not going to lie, the conditions weren’t the best; It was hot (especially when wearing your full blast suit), but more importantly, it was extremely dangerous. I recall the one evening when the sirens went off, one of the various political factions razed a local village. Incredibly terrifying. Extremely sad.

That first month was absolute hell. But after about 10 days you just give in. You give in. You give in to the heat, the bad food the constant danger that you’re in, but moreover, you give in to the fact that the slightest misstep will end your life, and so the uncomfortableness subsided. The fear subsided. Mostly.

It was after that first month that I converted about $500 into Kwanza and bought some cattle. Now some of you may already have an idea why, and the rest of you are asking, “Why? For what possible reason did Alexander de Coning buy $500 worth of cattle if he’s just going to leave in two months?” Hopefully, in asking that, you kinda already figured it out for yourself – it’s no picnic to repeat it.

I used those cows as my personal mine detectors. That’s right, I sent them into the mine fields, as I was just too damn tired of being afraid all the time. And though I know I should stop right there, I’ve got to ask you a question – have you ever seen a cow explode? It’s quite magnificent in its horror. Happy to report that at least the food got better from there on out – it was much fresher. Of course, the Ukrainians, and the village that sold me there cattle were plenty mad. Whoops.

The sad thing was, in 1999, the UN Security Council unanimously voted for removing 1000 servicemen (The “blue helmets”) from Angola. Unfortunately, nothing could stop or change the 40 year period of civil war or the clashing native leaders. As far as I can remember, the Indian peacemakers were the last to leave Angola, and they lowered the UN flag in Luanda.

I would like to leave you with one thought, and that is not to do what I did. You see, I used to use this as a pick-up line, and it worked extremely well! Until one evening where I decided to add the part about blowing up cows. And though a beautiful, intelligent woman may be reduced to mush, ESPECIALLY considering the way I tell this story (the horror, the danger, the humanitarianism), she will slip out of the awe-induced stupor when I start talking about blowing up cows. This used to be my favourite pick-up line, I perfected it after many tellings, but now that I’m a little older and a little wiser and I frankly cannot tell this story to every smart, pretty girl I meet, I stick to the tried and trusted, “I’m fucking rich” – that seems to work every time.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 7th, 2010 at 4:44 pm and is filed under Storytime with the Señor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.