Africa on a Pin and a Prayer

This true life adventure to the Middle East and Africa took place beginning in 1961, when I was 17-years of age. I left as a boy from the USA seeking adventure. In 1963, I came home to America, with life altering memories of experiences in places, peoples, animals, vistas and times that changed my immature perspective of life, forever! ~ Bob T. Epstein

Excerpt:
Massawa, "filthy" Massawa was my first experience with the degradation of children selling themselves as sexual objects. Little blue-eyed boys and girls propositioned us. These chocolate skinned children, we were to learn, were the progeny of the many Italians (as well as various visiting seafarers) that passed through or were stationed here and had strong economic control of Ethiopia and Eritrea for a very long time. There were hundreds of these bedraggled and waifish young people, who, for a bit of food would do anything, and whose degradation was directly proportional it seemed, to their miserable predicament. Many of these girls and young boys were the orphans of the lonely loins of sailors and occupiers alike, who made babies by the thousands. What I saw there were small, dilapidated attached homes; they were once clean and attractive abodes, now remnants of foreign occupational Italian provincials, vacated by the victors. They stood dirty and run-down in so many more ways than architecturally. These homes had young girls hanging out of every window, sitting on the front steps leading to their front doors, vying for the attention of anyone they could get to pay them a few cents for their sexual favors’.