I was supervising a trainee while he was taking his Sub-arc test this past week. While we were there, I met another welder that was taking another weld test. He had said he just got back from Equatorial Guinea, an Island off the coast of Cameroon in Western Africa. This was his third time being over there working at a refinery. He even had his drivers license in order to drive back and forth to the airport to drop off and pick up others that were coming in to work on the refinery.

I asked him how it was, he said if I've never been to a place like that in person that I have no Idea how bad it is. The Island is ruled by a Dictator, there's a risk of being kidnapped for ransom. Also when you use the phone it's always tapped, so you don't want to talk about money or give locations of exactly where you are. The workers stay in a small apartment complex on site at the refinery that is also surrounded by a wall. He went on in detail how uneducated those people were, and how poor.

They would hire locals to come in and clean up, sweep and pickup trash and such. He said the people they had come in to sweep didn't even know how to. They had no idea how to do anything, they had to teach them. He said he constantly had an Interpreter since he was one of only a few that had a license to drive on the Island. The Interpreter knew 4 languages, yet he could not read or write in any of them. He also went on to say how they have almost NO value for life. One time he had to take some guys to the airport, on the way there it had rained and some children were playing near the road and a truck has hit a child about 10 years old and killed her.

On the way back from the airport, which was about 3 hours later that same child that had been killed was still laying next to the road. It was about 8 months ago when he was there, they flew out of Malabo. No more than they got into the air, they were going back down landing at another place. He said when they landed there were military type looking men holding assault rifles surrounding the airplane while 3 men came on board, then they took off again onto Paris. There were many other things he mentioned, mainly detailing how poor people there were and how uneducated they were even to the simple things.

This man also talked about how pretty that place could be. He said it looks a lot like Hawaii with the banana tree's and such. It also has a lot of black sand from the Volcano on the Island. It was interesting hearing first hand from someone that has been to and seen places like this first hand. Makes a person count their blessing of the things we have here, and how lucky we are to live in the nation such as ours.

Last edited by Wolfgang; 04/14/12 09:57 AM.