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Outlook

Factual: Life Stories

True stories of ordinary people and the extraordinary events that have shaped their lives.

Outlook: Online Heartbreak, African in Space, Colombian Teenage Mums

Tracee Douglas, Mandla Maseko and Catalina Escobar

01/02/2015

Online Heartbreak, African in Space, Colombian Teenage Mums

BBC World Service - Outlook, Online Heartbreak, African in Space, Colombian Teenage Mums

Scammed by my online lover; from township to spaceship; saving Colombia's teenage mums

The Australina businesswoman who fell for an online fraudster. Plus, the man hoping to be the first African in space and helping teenage mums in Colombia.

Australian business woman Tracee Douglas decided to look for love online, but it ended up costing her thousands of dollars. The 49-year-old from Bundaberg in Queensland fell in love with an American soldier called Robert who she met on the internet. But eventually Tracee was devastated to discover that he was not the man she thought he was, but a 22 year old Nigerian fraudster. Today, she runs a group of hundreds of volunteers hunting down fraudsters who target people looking for partners online called Military Scammers: The Fight Back. 

Twenty-five-year-old Mandla Maseko was born and raised in the townships of Pretoria in South Africa, but he is hoping to become the first black African in space. He has competed with more than a million people all over the world and won a place on the Lynx Mark II Suborbital Vehicle which will take off from the USA early next year, on an hour long trip orbiting the earth at a height of 103 kilometres.  

Catalina Escobar gave up her successful business career to devote her life to helping teenage mums in her native Colombia. Following the death of her son - at only 16 months - she went on to set up a foundation to help poor teenage mums out of poverty by giving them access education and training. 

Tudor Lakatos is a schoolteacher in his late 40s who comes from a small village in northern Romania. But he is better known as Elvis Romano, an Elvis Presley impersonator and obsessive fan who performs the works of The King in the Roma language, which is widely spoken in the local gypsy community. 

Four years after the Tahrir Square protests began in Cairo, Egypt, many of those who took part are disillusioned. They feel they got nothing from the revolution, so if change has not arrived on the political stage, some young Egyptians have looked to themselves to make change and started their own personal revolutions.

Photo: From left to right Tracee Douglas, Mandla Maseko and Catalina Escobar.

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