Tuesday 27 August 2013
Yesterday, I finally had to accept that the very beautiful
Alexa who has been writing love letters to me for the past 6 weeks, most
recently from Abu Dhabi where she was spending the first leg of her annual
vacation, from her job at a top financial company in London.... was/is a male
Nigerian scam artist – her emails to me ceased abruptly at about 2pm, after I’d
had 2 calls from a very well spoken Black man, I assume Nigerian, who said he
was a courier, calling me from Johannesburg International Airport – he had just flown in from Dubai
with some jewellery & paintings purchased by my beloved in Adu Dhabi, and
would I send him the $1000 required for the Custom’s clearance fee – I said
Hold On Fella, and asked him to first please email to me the name of his
courier company, plus the Customs transaction paperwork, and the courier
company website, and could he please wait there at the airport, while I asked a
good friend who works at Joburg airport, to go & meet up with him &
verify everything – he then became very impatient and bossy, and after some
further verbal skirmishing the call was ended.
Suddenly, another email from my dear Alexa, who hadn’t
emailed me once in the past day+, to say she’d had a call from her courier, and
was there trouble – I wrote back saying that the courier man was aggressive
& rude, and that I had had to remind him that he was a person being
employed by somebody else [and therefore being paid by somebody else] to do his
job of bringing in some goods, and he should therefore act & speak politely
& professionally, and not become rude & pushy on the phone – and I
shared with her that I did not have immediate access to $1k [about R14,000-00]
and that I would not pay it to such a rude man if I did, and that I had been
warned by friends that I might be asked for money, and that my friends thought
the whole thing was a scam – but that I had been defending her honour, against
the suspicions of the few friends I had confided in....
She immediately went into a bit of an email fit – how could
I accuse her of being a scam, the most ‘horrible’ thing she had ever been
accused of, and she felt such shame, that she had asked me to help her, and I
had told my friends about it/her – then a second call from the male courier, in
which I gave him a real blast & a rev, and then no more calls or emails,
and I fear my Princess has flown back to London in tears, hopefully with the
jewellery & paintings that her courier took back to Dubai [I told him that
he should do that, and that seeing as they weren’t edible goods, he would not
be able to eat them during the flight, but I supposed he could steal bits of
jewellery, but hoped he would deliver them safely back to his customer, and
when she arrived to visit me in East London, we could then make arrangements to
have her goods sent out again from Dubai, if he hadn’t stolen them, or in his
rage jettisoned them into the Indian Ocean on the flight back to Dubai, with
the pilot’s permission & complicity, seeing as they would have to be thrown
out of a large door or window, being fairly large paintings etc...
So, the international syndicate of Nigerians have lost this
battle, no doubt they are busy with a few thousand others, and maybe will
succeed in a few, which will amount to a few thousand dollars, which isn’t bad
pickings for some kids writing love letters and some well-spoken man making a
few phone calls – the darker side of it, is that they are an emotionally
psychophantic force/outfit, and will stoop to whatever level they must go, in
order to hook the Beloved and coax him along with various stories, until the
final Hit, when he gets that sudden call, from a business-like courier, who has
no time to muck about, he needs $1000 sent to him post haste, to Joburg
airport, where he is trying to get his parcels past the Customs Desk, and he
will not happily or easily accept a ‘No’ from the man who is supposed to cough
up this money as his intended bride has sweetly warned him would happen [except
she never said it would cost so much, and I had thought it would be to a
courier company here in East London, who I would be able to visit in person, and
not to some telephonic person at Johannesburg International]
So I presume it’s all over, gullible lust-crazed male that I
am – but she was so very beautiful, and
we had somehow gotten over the first bump, when many weeks ago I wrote to her
that her English was not ‘native English’ – which was puzzling to me, seeing as
she said she was an only child, born in USA to American parents, and she had
done her university studies in Chicago – her father had died when she was a
mere ten years old, and her mother had gone to live with her grandmother in
Rome...
I remember that she had been a bit curt with me questioning
her use of English – I had told her that she sounded like a Russian [I like the
Russian people I have met, very much] or like an Eastern European person [I
like them too, especially their women], with a fairly good command of English,
but not an excellent/perfect command [actually her English was very
rudimentary] – somehow that whole query about English grammar & syntax was
very quickly brushed under the mat, as we moved on to much nicer stuff, like
how she already had fallen in love with me and she was looking forward to
‘making sweet love to me’ etc...
As I wrote to a good friend last night, to re-assure him
that I hadn’t parted with any money and that I had finally accepted it was a
scam – at least it galvanised me into doing some very necessary work, in
preparation for the imminent arrival of my Beloved – I have almost finished
installing a beautiful old cast iron bath into my garden, beside the honeymoon
tent – on Saturday I dug the trenches, and later mixed & poured the
concrete, for the feet that will hold the bath in its almost level bed,
surrounded by indigenous foliage & ferns – I have also planned a simple
bamboo fence around the bath, for some moonlit privacy, and to thwart some dear
friends who have seen my Beloved’s pics, and who might have been tempted to
detour past my plot on their evening walks through the bush, to arrive
unannounced and admire from behind thorny foliage the sublime form of my
bathing beauty – I will still install the bath, and build the bamboo fence – maybe not put out all
the candles & other pretty things – but at last I will have a deep bath,
where I can soak in hot water with Epsom salts [it took hours of back-breaking
work with various sanding machines to get that bath smooth on the inside] – and
I will also proceed with the simple work of sorting out the tent – I bought a
very clever tool yesterday at a caravan shop in Beach Road, that will allow me
to connect 4 long & thin gumpoles at the apex of the tent interior, and bow
them outward along the four inner tent seams, to create an inner sanctum that
bulges out & away from you when you are inside the tent, instead of the presently
loose flapping tent sides that have just sagged ever more inward over the
months of wind & weather – so the tent will become habitable again, and I
have bought a cheap wooden bed base, and arranged to have a futon brought from
Port Elizabeth, a gift from my niece who is moving to London soon – and then I
can stay there happily in my new ‘Out-of-Africa’ tent, with beautiful bath just
outside in a bamboo fence enclosure, and a fire going very nearby, upon which I
can heat up water [I cut off the top third of the 44 gallon drum about a week
ago – it was just a bit too high for easy bucketing out of hot water] – and
there will also be a declivity under the cast iron bath, for shovelling coals
into from the nearby fire, and I might even make a small fire under the bath,
and lie there at night, looking up at the stars, while my flesh slowly boils
away – one way to lose unwanted pounds maybe..
So again, and as I
was bbmming to a friend last night, while having a long belly laugh, at least
my betrothed galvanised me into action, and very soon I will be living the life
of a colonial gentleman, circa 1790, with tent & bush bath, but alas
without the obedient team of cooks & slaves those gentlemen had in their
camps...
In the massive preparations for her arrival, I also had my
bakkie serviced, front shocks & brakes renewed, ready for long distance
driving – and its actually much better driving even over the shorter distances,
like the almost daily trips into town & around - it’s been a very busy few weeks of massive
preparations, and the best of all, is
that I am not at all heartbroken or crestfallen – I had a very good laugh via
bbm with a friend last night, and enjoyed telling friends in various places
yesterday about the whole saga as it played itself out on my phone and in
Joburg International & Abu Dhabi – and if anything I feel relieved &
lighter - I did know at the back of my
mind that it was all a hoax, but that didn’t prevent me from writing long &
lovely emails to her, and holding out until the last moment, just in case she might be real, and might come visit
me, broken English and all – her beauty
made all that stuff unimportant – who knows, a big & dark depression might
be waiting in the wings to give me a huge post-traumatic klap sometime in the
next days/weeks – but I will rest up & keep my senses on hyper alert, so
that I don’t get taken unawares by anything, be it Depression or Darkness masquerading
as Innocence and Beauty...
So be warned, dear friends & people – the Nigerians out
there in cyberspace don’t take prisoners, and they don’t care what lies they
might have to invent in order to make another few dollars [they talk in
Dollars] and they don’t care what emotional or collateral damage they might
inflict in their headlong pursuit of the greenback [and please forgive the American
military term – I’m referring to ‘collateral’
here, not the ‘dollars’ word]
It’s just another day in Africa, and another minor skirmish
in the modern cyberspace game of
Survival of the Dastardliest J
[ I shared this story, of my American/Lebanese/Russian
Princess yesterday as it developed, with one new friend, in between the calls
from the increasingly irate courier at Joburg Airport, and with a few others
via sms & BBM in the evening after darkness had set in – mainly because
those few friends I had told about the most recent developments [ the expected
arrival of parcels of jewellery & paintings] – they had told me I was being
set up to receive drugs – a friend in the SAP even phoned a friend of his, in
the Organised Crime & Drugs Unit, who said we mustn’t get our nerves into
too much of a tangle – he didn’t think it was drugs – just some Nigerians
setting me up for a dent in my bank account
- I had to let those friends know
that it was all over, and that they didn’t need to worry for my sake anymore –
I know in my bones that they didn’t care a hoot about my feelings, or my
emotional vulnerability and broken heart – they were primarily worried about my
recently replenished but fast dwindling bank account reserves – and I had sworn the SAP friend to absolute
secrecy about the whole affair, because even if she was using me as a front to
bring in drugs, I was ready to take the risk, in the light of her utter beauty,
and once she had arrived here in my town, I would try to gently persuade her to
stop the drugs trade thing, and to swap her high living & expensive Armani
clothes for more functional khaki & bush outfits, and learn to love Nature
and grow things to eat with me [she had already said she was keen to do some
gardening here at my place, after I sent her a pic of my monkey-proof veg
garden] – anyway, we had alerted the drug squad, and they said not to worry, so
I felt in the clear, and that I didn’t need to fear arrest & some days in
jail – some other friends had told me that it was definitely a drugs set-up,
and that I would be arrested because the CIA etc are monitoring our every email
conversation, and that another friend of theirs, innocent, had in the last
month been confined to jail for 3 days after his court appearance, and had met
up with gang 28, and after coming out of jail he wasn’t the same person
anymore, he said very little, except that it had been a harrowing experience,
he wouldn’t wish it on his worst enemy, and he hardly saw anybody for a week
afterward...
