Mirage Travel Writing Podcast
Welcome to Mirage Travel Writing Podcast, I’m your host William Barlow.
After two decades of indigent wanderings, I’m coming to you with stories, curiosities, and questions. In this first season, there will be narratives of sleeping on the streets in European capitals. There will be tales of crocodile men in remote Central African Republic and armed groups in eastern DR Congo all told through the experience of an aid worker. We will try to understand what it means to be a foreigner in clanic Palestinian society, and why not chronicle the ins and outs of a Parisian sexclub during a gangbang. Stories, all told with the tact of an anthropologist. Somewhat.
The storytelling is pulled from ten years of published and unpublished writing about the West, the Middle East, and Africa and raises questions relating to cross-cultural understanding or better yet, misunderstanding. I welcome your feedback and interpretations of stories, namely on the many oddities that come from travel across cultures.
The podcast will also feature writing from listeners. Writing that can be published anonymously. Writing of confusion or awe at the puzzle of cultures. Stories that serve no other purpose but to be told.
Mirage Travel Writing Podcast
Giving Things Away for Free Ain’t Easy (in eastern DR Congo)
A blow by blow of a humanitarian aid distribution in eastern DR Congo
The aid industry is selling you a lie but it’s one that’s necessary.
The poignant photos on aid organization websites showing beneficiaries in Africa and Asia as grateful recipients of aid are misleading.
The lie is necessary because you, the viewer might not know that Giving Things Away for Free Aint Easy and that fieldwork is full of sabotage, ingratitude, and treachery which doesn’t make for good public relations.
It took me years to understand why fieldwork is full of sabotage, ingratitude, and treachery. I had to learn the hard way.
A lie becomes necessary--although a photo is worth a thousand words, they wouldn’t be enough to correct the assumption that poor people, because they are often portrayed as powerless, live in a world without power structures.
They don't.
Intro Music by The South Hill Experiment, Baird, Goldwash— Chameleons, episode music by Thor drowning into forever
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If you enjoy what you're listening to but would rather hold these stories in your hand, say while riding on public transport to mom's house or to the mirage of self-actualization through travel, you can buy a book or two at miragetravelpodcast.com
