Bush Flying
Hello all:
I left Canada in 1993 with 630 hours. I had flown a wheeled Cessna 206 for two seasons in the coast mountain range, and heard that there were a lot of twin turbine aircraft flying out of Nairobi to Somalia. I arrived with a little cash in my pocket and not much else. I was hired after a while by a South African company and flew under contract to UNICEF and the ICRC. I got my Kenyan license and flew about 1500 hours in a little more than a year and a half. The pay was abysmal, the flying was great and I got the experience I needed to get a job flying in the U.S. I now fly the Boeing 737 for Southwest Airlines.
I also was hijacked, held hostage, saw a guy get shot with an AK47 right in front of me, picked up little kids in the middle of the desert with destroyed limbs from landmines and went from one week not being able to fart with confidence to another week unable to even fart. You really get tired of dead telephone lines and failing electricity, but if your goal is flying I would say get some commercial experience and probably a U.S. license (it is widely recognized) and head for the dark continent. There are plenty of unemployed pilots in Africa, but even more in Canada. If you don't fancy Africa, try places like Irian Jaya or Papua New Guinea were nobody wants to go and fly.
You have to give up a lot to get what you want, but for me it has really been worth it.