How One Camera, One Ghetto, and a Herd of Ungrateful Elephants Bankrupted My Wallet, My Sanity, and Any Hope of a Quiet Life. Let me take you, dear reader, on a rollercoaster ride so violently absurd that even the most masochistic thrill-seeker would rather take a cheese grater to their own kneecaps than buckle in. We love stories of meteoric ascension, don’t we? The kind where some dirt-poor underdog claws their way to fortune, clutching designer sneakers, overpriced watches, and a crippling cocaine habit along the way. We worship the Silicon Valley demigods, the rags-to-riches pop stars, the socialites who manage to monetise their own existence with the sheer force of vapid entitlement.
But what about the ones who take the scenic route straight to hell? The poor bastards who, through a series of spectacularly bad decisions, manage to torpedo their own financial empires in the name of something as recklessly naïve as "trying to make the world a better place"? Surely, the universe rewards such noble aspirations with open arms, golden opportunities, and perhaps a well-deserved standing ovation—right?
It doesn’t.
Providence, as it turns out, is about as merciful as a loan shark with a toothache and a gambling problem. Instead of handing out opportunities, it hurled flaming anvils at me with the manic enthusiasm of a coked-up rodeo clown. And, like the idiot I was, I just kept dodging, stumbling, and collecting concussions—fully convinced that at some point, fate would run out of ammo.
So, if given the chance to do it all over again, would I?
Well, let’s put it this way: if the alternative was being stranded on a mosquito-infested sandbar the size of a yoga mat, surviving solely on gas station sushi, while being force-fed a never-ending podcast about 'the power of positive thinking'—I might just take my chances with the island.
Did I learn anything? Oh, undoubtedly.
Was it worth it? Depends. Are you asking my bank account, my dignity, or my life expectancy?
Would I sign up for this twisted little odyssey a second time? Not even if the universe threw in an all-you-can-eat buffet of consequence-free revenge, whiskey aged in barrels of pure schadenfreude, and a personal assistant who could erase my mistakes before I even made them.
Ignorance, as it turns out, is not just bliss—it’s survival.
How It All Began…
This particularly ill-advised escapade—a grand exploit spanning nearly six years—began innocently enough, as most imminent train wrecks do.
It all started with a Kenyan safari, the kind beloved by overpaid executives who wanted to slap a little bit of “authentic nature” onto their otherwise sterile, air-conditioned existences. The kind of “adventure” where ‘roughing it’ meant enduring the psychological torment of a slightly wilted mint garnish on their sundowner cocktails. Where the most ‘wild’ thing in camp wasn’t the wildlife, but the feral panic that set in when the Wi-Fi flickered.
Exactly my kind of wildlife experience: a seamless blend of opulent excess and heavily curated danger. The sort of place where even the most hopeless city dweller—someone whose only previous encounter with ‘wilderness’ involved taking a wrong turn at Whole Foods—could strut around feeling like Crocodile Dundee. If, of course, Crocodile Dundee had been raised in a penthouse, believed mosquitoes were a deep-state conspiracy, and required a private butler just to survive the trauma of folding his own napkin.
These two-week expeditions weren’t about survival, self-discovery, or ‘finding oneself’ in the vastness of nature. No.They were glorified summer camps for the obscenely overcompensated—a playground where soft-palmed executives could zip themselves into some freshly ironed, ethically sourced safari gear and pretend to be one with the wilderness.
Of course, any actual tribulation was meticulously filtered out, much like their drinking water. The greatest challenge? Deciding whether to endure the injustice of a lukewarm towel service before dinner or survive the unthinkable cruelty of slightly wrinkled bedsheets in their ‘wilderness lodges.’
Even their moments of “roughing it” were so painstakingly sanitised they might as well have come with a corporate sponsorship. Fancy a fireside chat under the stars? Marvel as your ever-dutiful Maasai guide subtly redirects the seating arrangement so that the fire’s actual smoke—a genuine element of nature—never offends your delicate sinuses. Want to test your survival instincts? Struggle valiantly through a hand-curated Serengeti picnic, where the greatest threat isn’t lions, but a slightly overcooked quail egg in your pre-packed gourmet basket.
And should disaster strike—should they, God forbid, spot a bug in their farm-to-table soufflé—there would always be a dedicated, impeccably trained staff member standing by, ready to neutralise the crisis with all the precision and urgency of an elite counterterrorism unit.
Money? A whisper in the wind, about as meaningful as a calorie count on a deep-fried cheesecake or a lifetime warranty on a paper umbrella.
The only urgent question that needed immediate attention was: How the hell did I end up here? This wasn’t me. I’d once prized simplicity, lived for the thrill of the fight—not this bloated, designer-clad farce of a life, a never-ending carousel of hollow vanity events, preposterous investments, and the soul-eroding dilemma of whether to cram one more five-figure watch into my suitcase or leave room for the emotional baggage instead.
Somehow, without me even noticing, my life had become a taxidermied version of adventure—safari trips so meticulously pre-packaged and rehearsed they made Disneyland seem like a knife fight in a prison yard. A world where everything wild had been defanged, declawed, and presented on a linen napkin—except for the animals, who were probably just waiting for their turn.
And then came the most dangerous thought of all—the kind that upends entire existences and bankrupts the foolishly optimistic: I crave something real. Something that leaves scars instead of souvenir photos, something that doesn’t come with a five-star TripAdvisor rating and a gluten-free menu.
I wanted to struggle. To fight. To claw my way through chaos like I once had, before my ambition was wrapped in silk sheets and smothered by the weighted blanket of privilege.
But here’s the thing about longing for struggle when you’re insulated by money: It makes sure you get your wish. And not in the "tough workout and a detox smoothie" kind of way. No, Providence is a vindictive bastard with a cruel sense of humor.
One minute, I was a first-class passenger in a life of luxury. The next? I had managed a financial nosedive so catastrophic it should have come with black box recordings and a dedicated search team.
I went from a world where 'effort' meant deciding between Armani or Prada—to a place where struggle wasn’t some curated experience with a safety net and a wellness debrief. Trouble wasn’t a weekend retreat for wealthy masochists dabbling in hardship before their return flight to comfort—it was the oxygen people breathed, the ground they walked on, and the only guarantee life had to offer.
In this new world, existential survival wasn’t a team-building exercise for corporate sociopaths. There were no emergency exit signs, no helicopters standing by for extraction the moment things got “a little too real.”
Here, misery wasn’t a novelty—it was the local currency. And I?
I was flat broke.
I went from pondering whether my brogues perfectly complemented my Armani suit to standing in the rain, debating whether I should spend my last ten bucks on eating that day or replacing a windshield wiper so I didn’t hydroplane my way into an unplanned funeral. Survival tip: When money gets tight, you learn to play a high-stakes game of “Which Problem Will Kill Me First?”
I became so adept at running my tires into oblivion that if Mr. Clean had seen them, he’d have looked like a well-groomed poodle on a bad hair day. Turns out, yes, you can quite literally drive on the steel radial lining until the rubber is nothing but a distant memory and you're essentially piloting a metal sled down the highway, hoping the laws of physics take pity on you. Spoiler: They don’t. Physics is a spiteful deity, and if you spit in its face long enough, it will eventually throw you into a ditch just to teach you a lesson.
And that, dear reader, is where our story truly begins.
The Turning Point: Where Good Intentions Go to Die
An unplanned detour. That’s all it took. One wrong turn, one ill-advised impulse, and I found myself knee-deep in East Africa’s most notorious ghetto, Kibera. Not exactly a hotspot for luxury safaris or an influencer-friendly ‘authentic experience’ complete with artisanal cocktails and a curated photo op.
And yet, there I was, standing in an orphanage that looked like a misplaced dream in the middle of a concrete wasteland. It was the only real building for miles, surrounded by a jungle of scrap metal and cardboard shacks, where walls were held together by sheer willpower and maybe a couple of rusty nails.
Inside, children who had been given up, abandoned, or literally thrown away like last week’s leftovers looked at me with eyes that had seen too much for their age. These weren’t the storybook orphans with neatly combed hair and endearing British accents. No, these were children who had been discarded in dumpsters, left to die on trash heaps, or hidden away in shame because they had the audacity to be born with physical or mental disabilities.
Their only crime? Inconvenience.
Now, how exactly did I end up here? Divine intervention? A deep-seated humanitarian calling? A well-timed existential crisis?
No, nothing quite that poetic.
It wasn’t some grand moment of awakening. No thunderclap, no celestial chorus, no spirit guide descending from the heavens to deliver a noble quest. It was something far more dangerous—a fleeting, brain-dead impulse.
See, this particular bad idea had been marinating in my skull for days, gnawing at me like a rat with abandonment issues. That voice, the one that had been quietly whispering reasonable life choices for years, suddenly hijacked my mouth during an extended safari through the Maasai Mara in the late summer of 2009.
I was lounging on the terrace of my best friend Shlomi’s Nairobi estate—a place that could’ve easily doubled as a miniature zoo. The man collected animals the way other people collect wine or ill-advised tattoos: four dogs, two oversized tortoises that meandered across the garden like senile pensioners, a pond with goldfish floating around like they had nowhere else to be, and a singular house cat who seemed more invested in hunting mice than the existential absurdity of its life.
It was here, amidst this tranquil menagerie, that I blurted out my own doom:
"Hey, Shlomi, you know what? I should make a documentary about those poor kids living in the ghetto. I’ve got all the camera gear, so why not? Seems like a nice touch to life, don’t you think?"
And just like that, I had sealed my fate. I actually thought it would be a brilliant idea to stroll into one of the roughest slums on the planet with a camera worth more than a local’s yearly income and all the survival instincts of a boiled potato.
It would have been far less idiotic to wander into Benghazi, wearing a neon “Bring Back Gaddafi” sign and a scarf made of ATM receipts.
And so, with the blissful ignorance of a man about to be drop-kicked into reality, I was about to set off to make a documentary. Shlomi, however, just nodded approvingly.
What Shlomi actually thought of my sudden, wildly misplaced burst of altruism remains a mystery to this day. But I do know this: he looked at me like a man who had just watched someone propose to his dog, with a tortoise awkwardly standing as the best man. The kind of look reserved for moments when reality tilts on its axis—when you witness a level of idiocy so pristine, so untainted by rational thought, that it could only exist in a world where natural selection had clearly been outsourced to the lowest bidder.
It was the "are you hearing yourself right now?" look. The one you give a TSA agent who seizes your nail clippers like they’ve just foiled a terrorist plot, or the look you shoot at a dinner guest who earnestly asks if Beethoven ever released any new albums after he went deaf. The expression of someone who has just been confronted with stupidity so vast and unapologetic that their brain momentarily short-circuits, leaving them staring into the abyss of human ineptitude.
Because let’s be honest—what I had just suggested was not only absurd, it was an outright contradiction to the last decade of my existence. The idea of me throwing myself into humanitarian work was like watching a goldfish apply for astronaut training or a serial arsonist suddenly develop a passion for fire safety regulations.
Shlomi, to his credit, did not immediately burst into laughter. Instead, he took a long, slow sip of his drink, probably to buy himself time to decide whether I was having a stroke or simply experiencing the world’s most idiotic midlife crisis. Then, with a smirk that told me he was already mentally composing my obituary, he said,
"Well, if that’s the kind of entertainment you’re after, I just happen to know a lady who runs the darkest dungeon of human misery right here in East Africa’s biggest ghetto. An orphanage for disabled kids, right next to a high-class golf course in the heart of Kibera."
Ah yes, because nothing says "inspirational life change" quite like storming into one of the roughest places on Earth, camera in hand, with the tactical awareness of a headless chicken and the survival instincts of a man who confidently licks batteries to see if they still work.
Shlomi, it was clear, did not take me seriously. And honestly, why the hell would he?
And yet, despite my complete and utter lack of qualifications for anything remotely resembling philanthropy, here I was—on the verge of wading into Nairobi’s most unforgiving slum to document suffering. A place where suffering wasn’t an edgy theme for a student film festival, but the ambient background noise of daily existence.
Somewhere, Fate was already kicking back with a bucket of popcorn, gleefully waiting for the show to begin.
Enter Shlomi
For reference, Shlomi and I had met just two years prior—on safari, naturally—at a place called Bush Camp, tucked away somewhere in the Maasai Mara.
I had been there on a three-week mission, capturing wildlife photos with the dedication of a man who had long since blurred the line between passion and clinical obsession. Because when you spend more on camera gear than most people do on a house, you damn well better produce something that doesn’t look like it was shot by an elderly tourist with Parkinson’s and a bad attitude. And, in fairness, I did. Years later, those very photos would serve a far more practical purpose—keeping me from starving. But back then, my greatest struggle wasn’t survival; it was avoiding the typical safari crowd, that peculiar breed of humanity that believed looking the part was just as important—if not more—than actually experiencing nature. The kind of people who spent hours carefully coordinating their artisanal khaki ensembles, ensuring that not a single shade of beige clashed with another, only to shriek in horror when an actual speck of African dust had the audacity to sully their organic cotton shirts.
His arrival at camp was nothing short of a professional disgrace. Yes, he was a photographer—but not the kind who spent weeks tracking apex predators through the savanna or crouched knee-deep in mud, waiting for that perfect, fleeting moment. No, Shlomi belonged to photography’s most tragic underclass: the wedding photographers.
I had previously assumed that wedding photographers were little more than cautionary fables, whispered about in hushed tones by real photographers over campfires. “He once had talent… until the weddings got him.” The kind of tragic figures who started out with promise but were slowly hollowed out by a never-ending parade of bridezillas, tantrum-prone in-laws, and grooms who looked one stiff drink away from faking their own deaths.
And yet, here he was. A wedding photographer. In the Maasai Mara. A man who had spent his career capturing trembling grooms grinning through existential despair and brides who had no idea their happiest day was merely the prelude to a life of passive-aggressive furniture shopping.
His presence was announced with the kind of reluctant embarrassment usually reserved for admitting that your child had dropped out of medical school to pursue a career in interpretive dance—or worse, had become one of those YouTubers who reviews different brands of bottled water. The camp hosts practically shuffled their feet as they introduced him, their voices heavy with the shame of knowing they had allowed a wedding photographer past the gates.
I felt an immediate and profound sympathy—not for him, of course, but for the unfortunate couples whose once-in-a-lifetime moments had been immortalised in soft-focus abominations, dripping in cheap sepia filters and uninspired angles.
Still, curiosity got the better of me. After all, how often does one get the chance to observe a wedding photographer in the wild, far from his natural habitat of floral archways, shattered dreams, and open bars designed to numb the horror of lifelong commitment?
“So, you’re a frog then?”
That was Shlomi’s opening line. No introduction, no pleasantries—just a statement delivered with the kind of confidence usually reserved for brain surgeons and toddlers who have just learned their first swear word.
I turned to find him standing there, looking thoroughly out of place. Wedding photographer, alright. Blue jeans. A flamboyant t-shirt featuring what appeared to be a psychedelic-looking giraffe in sunglasses. A full-scale violation of every known safari dress code. He stood out like a Kalahari bushman in an Igloo village. No, scratch that. He stood out like a mime at a biker rally—confusing, vaguely alarming, and almost certainly in danger.
“Host said you’re from France,” he continued, speaking slowly, as if addressing someone who had just taken a concerning blow to the head.
I squinted at him. “Well, the hosts are morons, then. I’m German. Sauerkraut and Wehrmacht ring a bell?”
Shlomi’s face remained completely unmoved. “Host say your name is Marcel, which sounds pretty much frog to me.”
Ah, so this was happening.
I sighed. “Alright,” I deadpanned. “What’s your name?”
“Shlomi.”
I blinked. “That’s no name.”
“Sure it is,” he said, completely unfazed. “It’s an abbreviation.”
“For what?”
“Shlomo.”
He said it with such deadpan finality, such an utter lack of enthusiasm, that I completely lost it. I doubled over laughing, nearly dropping my camera.
“Shlomi,” I wheezed, wiping tears from my eyes, "you are an absolute idiot—but it’s nice to meet you.”
And just like that, without realising it, I had just met my future best friend.
We weren’t done yet with the pleasantries. Not by a long shot.
As if his hideous dress code wasn’t already offensive enough to make the entire Serengeti’s wildlife collectively evacuate in protest, Shlomi had somehow found a way to commit an even greater crime against photography. Hanging from his neck, like a cruel joke against all things holy and artistic, was a camera setup that looked like it had been assembled by a sleep-deprived raccoon rummaging through a landfill.
I squinted at it in horror. The lens—if you could even call it that—looked like it had been repurposed from an old marmalade jar, complete with the kind of warped glass that made everything appear as though it were being viewed through the bottom of a cheap liquor bottle.
It was attached to the body with what appeared to be the photographic equivalent of duct tape and blind optimism. The thing looked less like professional equipment and more like a booby-trapped science project that would detonate if exposed to direct sunlight, cobbled together by a particularly unhinged science fair contestant.
And there was Shlomi, peering through it with the general air of a bewildered beetle trying to pilot a commercial airliner or attempting to decipher an IKEA manual.
And then, the final insult: Canon gear.
I recoiled instinctively. Canon. The lowest rung in the exquisite hierarchy of visual entertainment. If the world of photography were a royal court, Canon was the village idiot dressed like a court fool, juggling mouldy fruit while Nikon and Leica sipped champagne in velvet robes.
“Dude,” I said, swallowing back genuine distress, “if I were you, I’d just draw sketches of the wedding couple. Your photo gear is an utter disgrace. An old shoebox makes better pictures than this abomination. Hell, perhaps I should let you borrow one of my cameras before you make some poor couple’s ‘special day’ look like happy hour at a funeral.”
Shlomi, unbothered by my disgust, simply shrugged. “Nah, I like the challenge. Anyone can take good pictures with a proper camera. I prefer the struggle.”
Ah. A masochist. Wonderful. The photographic equivalent of a man who insists on cutting his own hair with garden shears just to "keep things interesting."
I stared at him, searching for any sign of irony, but there was none. This man was serious. Dead serious. The kind of person who probably saw a burning building and thought, You know what? I’ll run inside and juggle chainsaws for fun.
I sighed, already exhausted by this walking atrocity to photography. “Alright, Shlomi,” I muttered, shaking my head, “you’re a moron. But I respect the commitment to your own suffering.”
He grinned, pleased with himself, like a cat that had just brought home a particularly rancid dead rat and expected applause.
“Besides,” he added, tapping his abomination of a camera like a proud father patting the back of his delinquent son, “this bad boy’s been with me through thick and thin.”
I glanced at the thing again. It looked like it had survived not just thick and thin but multiple near-death experiences. Possibly a war. Maybe a failed exorcism. It was less a camera and more an artefact—something future archaeologists would unearth and debate whether it was a primitive weapon or an ancient form of punishment.
“Yeah,” I said dryly. “I can tell. That thing’s been through more trauma than a child actor.”
Shlomi just laughed, completely unbothered.
And that, dear reader, is how I met the worst photographer on the planet—a man whose greatest skill wasn’t capturing a moment, but convincing people it was supposed to look like that. A man wielding a camera so offensively inadequate that a shoebox with a pinhole and a prayer could outperform it. And that’s when I knew—against all logic, against all common sense, and possibly against the laws of nature—this idiot was going to be my best friend.
Only two years later, we were sitting on his terrace—me, expectantly staring at him, eager to soak in every grimy detail about this orphanage, the slum, the whole nine yards.
Shlomi leaned back, exhaling like a man about to explain the laws of thermodynamics to a particularly dim goat. "Well," he began, rubbing his chin, "you can’t just walk in there on your own. That slum is rougher than a Ryanair touchdown in a crosswind, and the mood in that ghetto is about as cheerful as a medieval plague ward.”
Ah. Fantastic.
I nodded slowly, pretending to consider my options—though let’s be honest, any sane person would've already reconsidered their life choices by this point. Not me, though. No, I was still under the delusion that this was a good idea.
“You’ll need a guide,” Shlomi continued. “Someone who knows the place, speaks the language, and ideally doesn’t want to see you dead.”
I blinked. “That last part feels rather important.”
“Oh, very,” he agreed, as casually as if we were discussing wine pairings. “Foreigners in Kibera tend to attract a lot of attention. And not the kind where people ask for selfies.”
"Great," I muttered. "So what you’re saying is, if I show up waving my camera around like some clueless documentary filmmaker, the locals will what—mug me, skin me, and wear my face as a hat?"
Shlomi thought for a moment. “Mug you? Definitely. Skin you? Probably not. Wear your face as a hat? Hmm… unlikely, but I wouldn’t rule it out entirely.”
Lovely.
I exhaled sharply, pressing my fingers to my temples. "And yet, here I am, still thinking this is a brilliant idea.”
Shlomi chuckled, the kind of laugh reserved for people about to witness a truly spectacular train wreck. “Oh, it’s an idea, alright.” He clapped me on the shoulder, far too amused for my liking. “But hey, you wanted real, right?”
Real. Yes. That’s exactly what I had wanted. Real suffering, real danger, real consequences.
And—like the reckless, privileged fool that I was—I was about to get exactly what I asked for, just not in the neat, cinematic way I had envisioned. There would be no stirring orchestral soundtrack, no poetic montages of hardship met with triumph. No, this was raw, relentless, and entirely unfiltered—a conveyor belt of human suffering rolling past at a speed too fast to process and too slow to escape.
I had imagined hardship like a well-framed photograph: tragic, yes, but with a certain artistic dignity, a kind of structured pain that could be understood, packaged, and maybe even fixed. What I found instead was suffering in its most chaotic, industrial form—grinding, impersonal, and utterly indifferent to my presence. It wasn’t a story waiting to be told. It was a reality that had been screaming into the void long before I ever showed up with my camera.
All the preparation in the world—every book I had read, every documentary I had watched, every smug little thought I’d had about understanding poverty—amounted to nothing. Because there, in the slum, suffering wasn’t something you studied from a comfortable distance. It was the air you breathed, the ground you walked on, the eyes that looked straight through you because they’d long since stopped expecting anything from people like you.
And for the first time in my life, I realised I might have walked into something I wasn’t ready to walk out of.
Marcel Romdane: Casually Handing in My Resignation from Wealth, No Backup Plan in Sight.
Serious Business. Shlomi. Life in the Ghetto. The Orphanage in Kibera
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