Así es la VIDA en el país AFRICANO que NO EXISTE en los MAPAS | Somalilandia (2/4)

In this country, the camel is so important that if you kill someone, you have to pay the price for that crime in camels. Because of the same problem this country is entangled in, see the towers of bills on the street, it's the only way many people can get cash. In the previous video, we drove more than 8 hours from Ethiopia to the border, on a road where we were very close to being arrested for being mistaken for spies. All to enter Somaliland, a country that is hardly recognized by anyone in th

e world and that doesn't exist on the maps we know. Today we're going to discover what everyday life is like here and what are the consequences of living in a country that lurks in the shadows. Good morning, afternoon, or evening, I hope you're super well! Friends, today we are in uncharted territory. We arrived in a country that theoretically doesn't exist, a country that's not on maps. If we search, it's simply a piece of land annexed to another country. But in reality... Oops, oops, oops. Tha

t car passed very close. They drive like crazy here. But in reality, it's a completely independent nation with everything separate, they have their own currency that we have to go and get at the world's biggest street exchange market. They have their own embassy, their own consulate, their own passport. There are approximately seven million inhabitants, imagine, seven million people who theoretically don't belong here, but who lead a completely normal life in this place. It's a territory roughly

the size of Uruguay, about 177,000 square kilometers, and the language they speak is Somali, because they share practically everything from Somali culture, they are Somalis. It's a country that in 1991, after a civil war, became independent from Somalia and was recognized only for five days by the nations of the world. After that, it was declared that the declaration of independence was null and void, So, since then, they live as a ghost country that exists nowhere. Only for themselves is it an

independent nation and as for two or three that recognized them. So today we are going to delve into the streets and the lives of the people of this country to see what pros and cons there are to living in a ghost country. That is hardly recognized anywhere in the world, and it also makes me think: how many other countries might be in this same condition? Friends, join me to discover Somaliland. Many things work differently in this country due to the same problem it is entangled in, but somethi

ng that apparently won't change throughout Africa is that even though we are in the capital, in the most populated city, where there is more development, if you want to get something, you have to go to the street market. Because at the street market is where everything is sold, from shoes, clothes, new items, used items, to money, packages of money move here. But first things first, relax, don't get anxious... We're going to blend into society... What you see here is one of the typical hats of S

omaliland, so we're going to put on one of these. Let's see... What do you think? Are we now camouflaged? Are we one more of the landscape now? What reigns is the informal trade and this: when the police come or when someone comes, they collect everything in the cart... What's going on? Relax... They just grabbed the camera by force... I don't know what happened... I was filming myself precisely to avoid having problems, And someone got angry and grabbed the camera, almost broke the lens... This

is the spice zone, there are so many spices in this part of the world that they get into one's nose. I wanted to show you a bit of this inner market, but the situation here is hostile. Like here is where they grab the spices, put them in these machines, and grind them... I see they also use donkeys to pull different things... But it seems like there are more men around here, more ladies and gentlemen... So this is a Muslim, very conservative country, in which I don't want to get into trouble. L

ook how crazy the meat market is, see how it's out in the open... I've seen a lot of these donkeys pulling a cart with this tank, well, this tank is a water tank. They tell me that a full water tank like this one is worth two dollars, and what he does is for people who don't have water in the city, which are many, very few have access to water from the tap; they just call him, and he goes to their houses and sells them water in this way. This one you see here is the public transportation of Geis

a. The public transport to go to the neighborhoods of Somaliland. There's something very important that we need, without which we basically can't do anything and that is that here we need bills because credit cards are not accepted, this probably related to the whole same problem the country has... Therefore, here there are money markets, where people have thousands of dollars in local currency on display. Which is this one we have here: the Somaliland shilling. They have so many bundles here on

the street because that's the way for people who don't have access to a bank, for example, like the nomads who are a large percentage in the country, they come here and get bills. Or also for people who have money on their cell phone, because everything here works with the cell phone, All the money changes, all the payments, all the payments in stores, in supermarkets, wherever, are through the cell phone. Like a kind of "simpe" for the people of Costa Rica, something like that. So, you come he

re, you do a simpe to him, you send money by cell phone and withdraw cash in case you need it. And here they can also change dollars, pounds, euros, they accept everything. What is most incredible about all this, is that this is the person who is allowing us to film the money but on this side, there's a man who left... He just wanted to go to lunch and he left... and he has more money than this other man, here there can be ten thousand, fifteen thousand dollars, it's too much money... But the se

curity and trust in this country is so great that he simply left it here and left. Sometimes they put a blanket over it, but he didn't even do that, in fact, that man already left, came, sold us the bills we needed and left. He simply put this thing over the bills and he's gone, left all the money he has here. Well, we've got these bills, there are only three types of bills, Five hundred thousand and five thousand, one US dollar is equivalent, more or less at the time of filming this video, to e

ight thousand five hundred Somaliland shillings. And look how the bills are: this is how they look... Over here it says Hargeisa... And on the other side, it has camels, because this is an extremely important animal in this country. Both camels and sheep. Now yes, we have bills so let's go. It's too impressive how in the middle of the whole market money is negotiated... How they have the bills there inside cages and people come to exchange. Living in a country that has these legal conditions or

these political conditions before the world has its pros and cons... Among the most notable, what we can find is that this is almost the most democratic country in all of Africa. One of the safest and most peaceful, and that can be felt on the street when being around here. However, against them, their passport is almost not recognized anywhere in the world, so they can't go anywhere, it's as if they were locked up. If they wanted to leave, they have to go to one of the neighboring countries to

Djibouti, to Eritrea or to Ethiopia to look for a Somali embassy, because obviously they can't cross into the neighboring country Somalia, they have problems, they have to go to another country to look for an embassy and make some kind of arrangement to get a passport that at least has access to different countries. Also, since this place is not recognized as a country, it doesn't have access to loans from entities like the International Monetary Fund. So it's practically never going to invest i

n infrastructure, it will always be what there is and with the corruption that also exists here, eventually, it might collapse. Also somewhat simpler things like not being a country, even though they have the best soccer team on the planet, they can neither go to the Olympics nor to tournaments nor even to the African Cup, because not even the African countries' organization recognizes them as an independent state. In Somaliland, there is the highest number of camels in the world. Imagine what a

large part of the camels in the Middle East come from this area of the planet, For this reason, we came to see the camel market, see the amount that is here and these are only the ones brought today to sell, usually, nomads bring them to sell. These camels in this country are seen as a gift from the gods. I don't know if camels kick, better walk carefully... They see them as a gift from the gods because they provide meat, they give milk, they are used for transportation, for working the land, a

nd all this in a desert climate, in an extreme climate. In fact, one of the main economic activities of Somaliland is the export of animals, of goats, sheep, cows, but mainly camels. So here come the nomads, they sell their camels either to restaurants, to people who want to have more camels to have more power or to export, to take the camels to other parts of the world, but they only sell the males. They are business sharks, they do not sell females, it is completely illegal to export a female.

And they negotiate in a way that only exists in this part of the world, too particular... Look, here a camel is being negotiated and everything is negotiated under this blanket, so that no one knows the price and thus they close the deal. You have a new camel, my friend! What you just saw is the Somaliland negotiation that not even my guide understands how it works, only the professional camel sellers know, but it's basically that each section of their finger has a price, so, they cover their h

and and start to touch different parts of the finger to negotiate the price. And finally, the deal is closed and no one here realizes how much the camel was sold for. Whether it was cheap, whether it was expensive, it is not known. If there is another buyer, it's a completely new deal. I don't understand well... no problem. He's telling me to hold it, I don't know if for a photo... Let's touch it... Wow, the skin is tough, is rough, the hair is also quite hard and very short. I kind of want a ca

mel to bite me... The price of camels starts at about $500 dollars for a skinny camel, this one next to me is a giant animal, can measure about 2 meters or more in height, the head must be higher, almost at 3 meters. One like this can cost $1,500 dollars. In the past, your social status depended on the number of camels you had in possession and even today, camels are still so important that people don't steal them from each other, it's like a matter of honor. Look, for example, this camel over h

ere has a phone number written on its skin because, if it were to get lost, they have to call the owner at this number to return it. They're not going to steal it. What I'm going to tell you is crazy... In this country, there is a current law, this is how it works today, where if one person kills another, the family has the right to three things: the first is to ask the authorities, to ask the police to kill the person who killed their family member. The second, to forgive them, or three, to ask

them to pay a price in camels, for killing a person, you could end up paying up to 50 camels for that crime. These vehicles you see are the ones that transport the goats and all the animals sold here. And I've been told something very interesting, that in this area we have in front, is where the mediators negotiate. Where the mediators negotiate with the nomads because it's not easy to negotiate with nomads, I imagine because of a language issue, because of a payment issue, the nomads need to l

eave quickly... So, they come here, negotiate with the mediators and once a deal is reached, the intermediaries take the goats over there to the other side to sell them to restaurants and the public. The way to buy sheep is as follows: you simply come here and touch its backside... They say that the bigger this backside is, which I rather thought was a bad thing, the better the sheep are. So, the sheep with the bigger backside are the ones that people choose to buy. Something interesting that ju

st happened to me is that a very kindly lady stopped me and just told me "young man, please, from the heart, convert to Islam, I don't want you to burn in hell. Convert so you can go to paradise." And look, I'm not telling this story to mock her, just, I don't know, I found it very nice that she approached me with all good intention to tell me something like that. I just got some powerful data and it's that here in Somaliland, the camel is so sacred that they drink camel's urine. And to prove it

to me, they offered to take me to a restaurant or a stall where they sell camel urine, where people go to drink camel urine. So, if possible, if we have time today, we're going to do it in the afternoon... We'll see. Something important is how life and health insurance work in this country. It doesn't work like in the majority of countries around the world, here in the Somali community, there's family insurance, the insurance of the clan, of the tribe. In the past, before Africa was colonized,

I imagine, some 500 years or more ago, there were no countries, there were no borders, everything was simply divided by tribes. Then they arrived, colonized, and so on, imposed limits and everything started to be divided into countries but still, for example, in Somalia, families are divided by tribes. "What tribe do you belong to?" is a very common question here and it turns out that if you lose your job, for example, or you have a health problem and can't afford the trip to a hospital, you tur

n to your clan, to your tribe and they will take care of maintaining and solving that economic problem for you. And this is how it works for all members of the clan. So, they don't have common life insurances, but they have this kind of Somali community insurance. This is another problem this country faces and it's that no big brand can come here because of one detail, And it's that when a big brand like Apple, McDonald's, or Pizza Hut comes to Somaliland, they have to put on all their official

networks and in all documents that they are going to open a branch in Somaliland. And not being a recognized country, I imagine they would enter into conflicts with all the other countries where the brand is established and do not agree with Somaliland being a country. So, I was happy to see this Pizza Hut, I was going to come to eat and they told me that it is probably a fake Pizza Hut. Just like the LG we found back there, the Samsung we have seen... They are people who acquire those products,

simply put the logo on the business, but it is not a real store of the brand. As a curious fact, here in Somaliland, they drive on the right side, but the street goes on the right side, just like we drive in the West. Unlike in other countries where the steering wheel is on the right and you go to the left and everything is more complex. If you have no experience, you crash into anything on the first try. The way iPhone sales work, for example, which is what we just saw, is that they bring seco

nd-category iPhones, from other countries and resell them here in Somaliland. The prices are normal, almost like second-category iPhones cost everywhere in the world. They cost 400,000 colones, $800, $1000, depending on the model, but that's the only way to get an iPhone in a country with this type of political issue we're seeing. Something interesting to analyze is that, curiously, just the restaurant of the hotel where we are staying, which is like the hotel where tourists apparently stay in t

his country, is the finest restaurant in the whole country. The most luxurious, the most beautiful, so we're going to go in not only to see it and what they offer, but also to see the prices, to see what prices might be here in Somaliland. What elegance, friends! A ceiling more expensive than in my whole house... An exceedingly fine restaurant, Charlie. Even with a free appetizer, they welcomed us and it's too cheap for how luxurious and beautiful it is. Moreover, here you can also see that ther

e exists a very, very small percentage of the population, but it exists, that is wealthy and probably they are here negotiating whether to sell a part of the sea or to buy a part of Ethiopia. Look at the food plates: we have this fish that costs 4,000 colones, about 8 dollars. The frappuccino at 1,500 colones, 3 dollars. Shrimp at 16 dollars. Lobster at 18 dollars and again frappuccino at 3 dollars. It's too cheap for the level of luxury. After everything we've seen during the day, you might won

der if these people are already a society that functions in a normal and independent manner, why aren't they recognized? Why don't they just sign it off as an independent country and that's it? As simple as that... Well, first off, there are many interests under the table that obviously we don't know about. But the easiest way to explain as an excuse for why this doesn't happen, why this doesn't occur, is because, just like this nation, there are many other nations in Africa alone that are funct

ioning independently, but that nobody wants to recognize as a country. So, the moment they recognize one, for example, the moment they recognize Somaliland, there would probably be protests that could end in civil wars in a bunch of countries around who will want exactly the same recognition they are giving to this one. So, on a grand scale and just skimming the surface, that's roughly the gist of it. Well, my friends, here ends today's video. Tell me what you think about all this madness of bei

ng in this country, what has caught your attention the most... Don't forget to subscribe, share the video if you liked it. By the way, the urine that I said we were going to try, we will try it. That's personal between you and me. Just wait, we have to find it. Don't forget to subscribe, share the video if you liked it, and see you in the next video. Pure life and kisses from someone who today was negotiating a camel.