About three years ago, TikToker Lauren Ashley (@lifeoflaurenashley) matched with a guy on a dating app. They met up and had a good time together.
She wasn’t attracted to him but felt that he was super cool, successful, and confident. She thought it would be the last time she ever saw him.
But the next day, he texted her, asking if she wanted to go to Africa with him to meet his family. At first, she said no, but as the trip got closer, she was feeling really bored.
So, she reached out to him and told her she would go if he booked her a first-class ticket. She was also unemployed and had nothing better to do.
“I don’t know if I should be admitting this, but to be honest, I didn’t know what I needed to go to Africa,” said Lauren.
“I guess you need certain vaccines and stuff like that. There was no time for me to get those because our flight was leaving the next day.”
Apparently, he had connections with some of the higher-ups in the country they were going to visit, so he was able to forge the documents that she needed to go to Africa.
He picked her up, and they got on the plane. When they landed, some government officials greeted them. They bypassed security and customs.
At this point, Lauren was starting to freak out because it was clear this guy was a very important person, and she was in a foreign country she knew nothing about. She also hadn’t told her friends or family where she was, so nobody knew she was in Africa.
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After they left the airport, they met up with a few of his friends in a parking lot. They all pulled up in these decked-out cars and handed him a huge suitcase full of cash.
Lauren thought for sure that she was being sold, but they were actually just exchanging currency for the country they were in so that he would have money to spend during their trip.
Then, they drove to a hotel. That night, she couldn’t sleep because she was stressed, and he was snoring loudly. She kept waking him up so he would stop snoring.
Eventually, he went to sleep on the floor of the bathroom. Not wanting to anger him, she convinced him to get back in bed.
The next morning, they got on a small plane and flew to his hometown, which was in a rural area. At this point, she was starting to feel sick due to heat stroke.
It was 115 degrees over there. She had likely caught some kind of bug or food poisoning as well, since she never got any of the vaccines.
When they arrived at his hometown, they attended a funeral for one of his friends. The funeral was more like a party.
“So, we get to the funeral, and a lot of people there hadn’t seen a white person before, so they were in awe of me,” Lauren said.
“At the time, I had bleached blonde hair, so all the kids were coming up to me, and they asked me to be a part of the funeral.”
Lauren was on the verge of passing out from heat stroke, but she didn’t want to be disrespectful, so she agreed. She stood in front of a crowd of hundreds of people and danced for everyone as they cheered her on. Then, the priest asked if he could tell her something in front of the whole crowd.
He proceeded to say that she was the most beautiful white girl he had ever seen and that she turned him on. The crowd cheered and chanted in response. The priest grabbed her hand and kissed it, ending the funeral.
“That was like a fever dream,” Lauren recalled. “I don’t know if part of that was me hallucinating or not from the heat stroke, but that’s where we were.”
Afterward, the guy took her back to his family’s house to eat some food, which was a mud hut. He told her not to shake anyone’s hand because the conditions there were dirty, and he was afraid she would become deathly ill.
The problem was that the meal was supposed to be eaten with your hands. His family tried to feed her, and she felt she had no choice but to accept.
Finally, she began stumbling around and was really sick. The guy wanted to take her back to the big city, so they could get medicine, but unfortunately, the airport had closed down for the night. The taxis were also not running at night.
Later, when they got a ride back to the city, she almost married him and found out a bunch of his secrets.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
