In this dream, the new Harry Potter movie had just come out in Mali, so I was celebrating with all my friends in various bars and open-air hotels. It was very familiar to the party village in Harry Potter that he sneaks to get wizard drunk or whatever. Even tho I don’t like the books or the movies, I was having a fun ol’ time because I was drunk.
Then, the environment changed so fast it was like lightning struck. The scales fell from my eyes and I saw all the poverty around me. Harry Cheadle from VICE was doing a documentary on the horrific lengths people would go to just to survive in Mali. I followed Cheadle around, but we were always followed ourselves – by large crowds of people hoping we dropped some food.
Cows were dead in the street, but their rotten flesh had been ripped off and eaten. I saw children literally eating trash. We helped some small kids build rafts out of broken garbage and they would sail away, but they never made it far before being destroyed by giant, prehistoric fish. I’m pretty sure people were cannibalizing each other.
Everywhere we went, people were trying to rip us off. $90 to look at a single butterfly and drink a cup of tea. $800 to surf on an Orca whale, despite that this isn’t possible. It’s no wonder this country was starving! Everything was overpriced, touristy bullshit!
Cheadle had a small hotel room and a rental car, but the rental car was set on fire by the owners so they could charge us for a new one. Cheadle solved this problem by throwing his cell phone out the window so they couldn’t call back. “This is how it is here,” he explained. “You gotta be one step ahead of the others.”
Cheadle showed me a restaurant where you had to pay ten cents for every bite you took. People were hunched over their plates, dropping dimes in cups while scooping up as much food as they could fit on a fork. The owners were standing there just laughing. Cheadle was going to take one bite every ten minutes and make sure he stayed their for five hours in silent protest of this evil business.
But then a poor villager knocked a plate off the table. She was surely going to be hurt, because the food looked so expensive, so I ended up knocking all the plates off in a chaotic scramble and we barely escaped.