Chick Writes A Book About Taking A College Gap Year To Help Children In Africa...Promptly Called Out For Making Basically The Entire Thing Up.

BF News – The Daily Telegraph published an excerpt of a memoir about a woman’s time spent volunteering in Zambia as a teenager. Louise Linton wrote about caring for an HIV-positive orphan and hiding out from murderous rebels. Sounds terrifying — except people say her story doesn’t add up.

The book’s description bills it as “the inspiring memoir of an intrepid teenager who abandoned her privileged life in Scotland to travel to Zambia as a gap year student where she found herself inadvertently caught up on the fringe of the Congolese War.”

Linton’s book had only attracted a bit of attention until the Telegraph excerpt ran. Then people, such as BBC Africa’s Victoria Uwonkunda, began calling out what they said were objectionable stereotypes and questionable claims.

One major point of dispute is Linton’s recounting of two raids by Congolese rebels. Many people in Zambia and from other countries in the region say there are no records of Congolese rebels invading Zambian villages the way Linton describes.

A Facebook post from Gerard Zytkow, who said he owns a fishing lodge near the one where Linton volunteered, is also being shared as evidence that the story was fabricated. He said a Congolese rebel boat did arrive in the area at one point — but it came to surrender. And soldiers who came a couple days later “were tired hungry and thirsty,” so he helped them.

Asked to respond to the accusations about inaccuracies and fabrications in her book, Linton initially replied in an email to say her “editor and publisher” is the person who fact-checked the book, but that she is in the U.K. and unreachable until tomorrow morning.

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Always a hilarious and entertaining thing to watch. When somebody publishes their memoirs about how awesome they are then slowly gets turned upside down and ripped apart for making all of it up. Feels like it happens wayyyy too frequently lately too – as if people don’t fully comprehend what the internet is, how many people use it, and how easy it is for the entire world to chime in with fact checking on anything you publish. Like…actual people in Africa. They have the internet and Twitter. You may be ok trying to sneak some unprovable, personal tidbits and stories in there that can’t really be verified…but talking about weather and rebels and battles and conflicts and jungles that don’t actually exist and never actually happened is where you’re going to run into trouble.

Linton’s claims about rebel raids aren’t the only points of dispute in the short Telegraph excerpt. She writes about “the Hutu-Tutsi conflict in neighboring Congo.” That conflict took place in Rwanda.

Linton also refers to “monsoon season” in Zambia, even though the country does not have one. (It does have a rainy season.) People also say it does not have the kind of jungle she wrote about fleeing into.

When Uwonkunda and Maambo and Muchemwa are calling you out live from the Zambian grasslands, you know you fucked up.

Let this serve as an important reminder for everyone out there – nobody gives a shit or wants to hear about your trip abroad.