TIA is a phrase we use often here. This Is Africa. Used in situations where you want to laugh your head off because things like this would not particularly happen in other parts of the world, mainly America.
So we’re going on a road trip last weekend to Banfora. We get 30 minutes outside of Dano, to a town called Dijibougou, where we intend to fill up on gas because after this town, there’s no gas station for another 2 hours or so (TIA #1). Once we pull up to a gas station the man tells us they don’t have any gas. In fact, there’s no gas at all in the whole town of Dijibougou (TIA #2).
So our options? Drive all the way back to Dano to get gas OR try and make it 2 hours on an almost empty tank (in Africa…not a good idea…tow trucks don’t really exist here). So we decide to check one more gas station to see if they really are all out. They are. But this new man tells us that these guys right down the road have gas and they’re selling it (TIA #3).
What do we do with this sketchy news…we check it out. Geoffrey decides the gas is actually good, so the men start filling up our tank. But please…let me introduce you to TIA #4…
These men literally put their mouth on one end of that green tube you see to get the gas to flow out. Not to mention, the man is standing there with a cigarette in his mouth and gasoline in his hand. It was cracking us all up, yet not one of us really made any effort to actually get out of the car.
But in their defense, they were actually some pretty smart dudes and they probably made a lot of money doing what they did that day.
WARNING: This may not be as funny as I thought it was at the time.