M&R Episode 022: Rusty lived incarcerated for 10 years in a Zimbabwe prison for a crime he didn't commit.

In Episode 22 I spoke with Rusty Labuschagne who got out of a Zimbabwe prison in 2013 after serving 10 years for a crime he didn't commit. His warm, joyful voice does not give any hint of bitterness towards his accusers. He found something in prison that changed his life and listening to his story has changed mine. He now get to share his story. Enjoy!

Show notes: Rusty Labuschagne, Living In Chains, Unique Speaker Bureau, Zimbabwe, Get a Misfits and Rejects T-shirt or Tank, Support Misfits and Rejects on Patreon

Audio Transcript:
Welcome to Misfits and Rejects,

a podcast about the lifestyle design of expatriates,

travelers, entrepreneurs, and adventurers.

I'm your host, Chapin Kreuter, enjoy.

I didn't fit in America.

With cocaine, there's just always too many guns

and too many bad attitudes.

I quit the limiting stories.

Really try to overcome that fear.

And right there, for any of your listeners,

a lot of what I was to do in the rest of my life

is formulated by the fact I just went and did it, goddamn it.

Welcome to another episode of Misfits and Rejects.

Today, I have the honor and pleasure

of speaking to a gentleman in Zimbabwe, Rusty Labuschagne,

a gentleman who was recommended to me

by one of my fans and followers who I'm honored

and so thankful that she reached out

to help me find this gentleman,

who with a little bit of research I found out

has one of the most profound, incredible stories

that up until this point I've heard

and actually haven't heard yet.

That's why we have him on the show.

So with that said, I'd like to welcome Rusty to the show.

Welcome, Rusty.

Thanks, Chapin.

Oh man, I'm so happy to have you.

Like I said, just a little bit of research

instantly turned me on, not just because of the experiences

that you've had, but because of your outlook on life.

And I kind of like to get the really,

the whole picture of you, your life,

and then where you're at today.

So maybe you can just take us back

to a little bit of your upbringing

and where you were before this incident happened.

And we're gonna tell the audience in a second

what this incident was, but I'd like to kind of

hold them in suspense for a second.

Okay.

I'm from the fourth generation Zimbabwean,

from a cattle ranching background,

and I still live in Bulao, Zimbabwe today.

And grew up humbly,

lost my dad when I was 12.

So we battled all the way through.

I have two sisters and a brother.

My mom struggled to put us through school and everything.

And then I got into the safari industry

when I left school and became very successful.

I had five fully operating safari camps,

fishing resort on Lake Kariba.

I was flying my own aircraft.

Before I became successful, just after school,

I played rugby for Zimbabwe, for the national side,

which was quite an achievement.

And in 2000, during the land invasion turmoil in Zimbabwe,

I had a dispute at my fishing resort on Lake Kariba

with some fishing cooperative that were poaching

in the area, fish poaching.

And I was on a, it was December 2000,

and I was on a fishing trip with a bunch of mates of mine.

And later on afternoon, one of my mates and I

decided to go fishing for tiger fish in the lake

and left the other guys bream fishing in the river.

Just one of the issues that flow into the lake.

And on our way back, we noticed two poachers,

fish poachers in a steel boat,

who immediately upon seeing us started paddling hastily

for the shore in an effort to get away from us.

And knowing they were known poachers,

I drove my boat towards them to scare them off.

And the wake of my boat tilted their boat,

causing them to jump out into the water,

which was about one and a half meters deep.

They were about three meters from the shore.

They scrambled onto the shore.

And then my friend and I watched

as they ran away into the bush.

The following day, the police arrived

and we were accused of drowning one of the poachers.

And to cut a long story short,

I was framed by the police, the courts, and the judge,

the judge and the poacher in an ugly conspiracy

and convicted of drowning that poacher.

And unbelievably, my co-accused only got a $10 fine

and was set free because I was driving the boat.

And that put me into,

at that time, the country was really battling

because I got convicted in April, 2003,

the 3rd of April, 2003.

The country was battling.

There was no money for the prisons.

So my first day in prison,

I want you to try and picture it.

We were 28 people in a cell 13 meters by three meters.

Each person had 33 centimeters of space.

That's like about 14 inches marked out on the walls in chalk.

And we were all packed like sardines

and all faced the same direction.

When you turned over, you all turned over together.

And as cushioning against the cold concrete floor,

you'd fold two of your paper-thin,

worn out, last written blankets

several times to fit your space,

then covered yourself with the third one.

Your clothes were wrapped around your toothbrush

and toothpaste or they'd get stolen.

And that was your pillow.

And from sleeping on those freezing hard floors,

my hips had bruised black rings for years

and shoulders still get troubled today.

But what I want you to say to you as well,

Chapin, is that in all the prisons in Zimbabwe,

there's no furniture whatsoever.

There's no beds, tables, chairs, cupboards, nothing.

It's just rows of filthy folded blankets

and worn out water bottles everywhere

and on bare concrete floor.

The other thing, one of the hardest things to deal with

were the lice that never went away, ever.

They would crawl and bite day and night,

leaving itchy, weeping blisters.

And because they never stopped, they were draining,

both mentally and physically,

and there's nothing you can do about it.

And then we only were ever allowed one set of clothing

at any one time.

After six months, you got a change of clothing, sometimes.

Other times, after nine months,

leaving you walking around in tatters.

I just want you to think about,

okay, let me go on to do a note,

basins or taps in the cells

and only one set of clothing.

So you had to wash our clothes

in the cell toilets at night, wearing a blanket,

then hang them on the walls with smuggled book staples

to dry by the next morning.

Now, just think about having to wear the clothes

you're wearing now for six months without a change,

then in order to retain your dignity,

having to wash them in a well-used toilet,

even if it was your sparkling clean toilet at home,

then having to wear them the very next day.

The humiliation was beyond comprehension.

And then in 2005, during the Zimdala crash,

Harare City ran out of water.

And for three years,

while in Chikaribu Maximum Security Prison,

each prisoner was allocated

only one plastic cup of water a day,

one cup of dirty orange City runoff water

from a nearby dam that was to drink,

clean your teeth, wash your face,

bath, everything for three years.

And then some of the other difficult parts in there were,

well, let me just get to what it's like

when you get imprisoned and you're innocent.

The first thing that goes through your mind is why me?

What have I ever done to deserve this?

And then it gets to maybe I'm being protected in here.

You know, there's a whole lot of things going through your head.

And then I started believing that

I've been put here for a reason,

because for the first,

there's no other way to get through it, Shepard.

It's the only way mentally

to get through something like that.

And the biggest lesson I learned in prison

was true forgiveness.

And the humiliation of being labeled a murderer

and terrible conditions were extremely hard to deal with.

As was the pain of my bitterness, anger,

hatred, frustration, revenge.

I hated them bitterly.

And initially would lie there for hours,

wishing every terrible thing on each of them in turn,

the poacher, the police, the judge, the ministry,

and all who were involved in my conviction.

And then one day I was struck by the realization

that they'd all forgotten about me long ago.

Here I was consumed by the unfairness of it all.

And they blissfully unaware of the evil

I wished on them every day.

In the end, I was only hurting myself.

I was carrying all that in my head

and beating myself up for nothing.

The single biggest lesson I learned in prison

was true forgiveness.

And to me, it's bigger than anything

we can achieve on our own.

True forgiveness is inspired by God Almighty

and so is letting go.

And it was a huge weight off my shoulders.

And I learned to live in the moment from then on.

The past was too painful

and the future full of unkept promises.

So I just dealt with each day as it was

because no amount of worrying

was gonna change what I was going through.

And I believe that if you have anger or resentment

towards anyone in any way,

it will eventually destroy you

because that is what those emotions do.

They steal from you.

They steal happiness and freedom.

And a lot of people said to me,

how did it come about?

How did you just suddenly forgive?

It's nothing that you can ever explain.

It's just one day I just set to myself

after all this anger and hatred and everything,

I just thought,

just let me let God take care of them.

And it was just like a switch.

One day I'll just let go

and I never thought about them again.

And people said to me,

but they've taken 10 years from you.

They've taken all your companies, everything.

You've got nothing left.

Don't you hate them, everything?

And my answer to that, Chopin,

is that I don't give them one second more thought.

They've taken 10 years.

They've taken watching my children grow up.

They've taken everything from me.

They're not taking another second of my thought.

That's all behind me now.

All I see in front of me is happiness, love and fun.

And when I look at how much they took

from my children, for example,

and my son was 18 and we used to discuss

and dream about making millions

and plan endless projects and adventures.

And my daughter, we have an extraordinarily beautiful bond.

And since the baby, she's always been my shadow.

And as special as she is to me, I am to her.

But at 16, I was her anchor.

I was everything in her eyes.

She confided in me without boundaries

and clung to everything I said and did.

And I loved them beyond expression.

And they loved me.

And the times they needed me most, I wasn't there.

They went through first loves, crushes, dances,

21st birthdays and entered the wild world.

And I wasn't there to see it.

And I don't want anyone ever to have to feel that way.

Just make enough time for your loved one.

Wow.

If there's anything you want to ask me,

but otherwise I'll just carry on.

I do have a few things I just want to go back

and kind of clarify for myself.

I mean, quite a few.

So just going back to when the gentleman,

did the gentleman actually drown and die?

No, no one drowned.

The guy's living in Zambia now, remade with two kids.

In that whole area, it's a well-known fact.

I spent $42,000 US dollars trying to find him.

And then I thought, it's like a needle in a haystack.

As soon as, it's a very, very remote area.

So as soon as any foreign person goes in there,

because I used private investigators to do it,

and they just came back, they were there for a year.

And they came back and said,

they got affidavits from God that had been with him.

No one was interested in that.

They wanted him.

Wow.

And I just, they're taking more and more from me.

Just let it go, put it behind me.

And something else while I'm on there

and I'm thinking about it, Chairman, is how you,

people say to me,

did you ever see a counselor when you came out?

And I said to them,

what counselor has ever been where I've been?

No one can ever teach me how to get through that.

And the way I did it was,

there's no interference in there.

So there's nothing distracting your feelings

from your physical feelings from your thoughts.

There's a direct link between your thoughts

and the physical, your physical feeling in your stomach.

So when I thought about my fiance with another man,

for example, it hurt me in my stomach,

or my friends having fun in Las Vegas

where we used to go every year, it hurt me.

So I counseled myself not to think about those things.

And I had this fantasy girlfriend called Cherie,

and we used to fly all over the world

and catch Marlon in Mexico, and everything felt fantastic.

And that's where I lived.

I lived in this fantasy world.

And it was all beautiful, but you have to.

It's the only way to get through that.

That's interesting, because I'd like to touch upon that.

We know when you found true forgiveness

and you talk about the mental, emotional connection.

Have you ever read the book, The Power of Now?

No, no.

Have you heard of it?

I have, I have, but I just haven't got around to reading it.

Okay, well, I've read it quite a few times

and I've found tremendously interesting points

that I can relate to.

And it sounds very relevant to what you describe,

where being in a prison, you have,

as Eckhart Tolle in the book says,

in every situation you find yourself

and you have three choices.

You can either accept it for what it is,

you can somehow try to change

the situation you're in directly,

or you can walk away from it.

And under the circumstances that you were in,

you had only one option,

which was to accept the circumstances

that you found yourself in

and find another way to free yourself

from the circumstances,

which was not allowing your mind to go

into those dark places

and realizing that your mind is creating

this illusion of sorts.

And can you talk more about that?

Cause this actually really fascinates me.

You know, that kind of lightning bolt moment

that you had, it sounded like,

where you just kind of realized

and had everything drip away from you.

Like, I'd really like to get into that if you don't mind.

No, no, I love that part of it.

You want me to try and explain

what triggered me to that decision?

That and the feeling that corresponds with it,

because I think, and I'm no expert on this,

I practice what this book talks about every day,

the power now keeping my present consciousness

present in the moment and not allowing

the past or the future to corrupt my internal environment.

But I feel like it's more of a feeling than a thought.

It's more of an overall feeling

that people need to understand

rather than trying to think their way out of a situation.

And I think you have a great story in that

you realize you couldn't necessarily

just think your way out of it.

You had to accept it.

This is where you were gonna be

for the next 10 years of your life.

And you found somehow peace and salvation in that.

Is that correct?

Yeah, you get into like a survival mode

because you have no control of anything in there.

They control what you read, write, eat, drink,

say, hear, everything controlled.

So you have no control.

You have to accept what is there.

And when I say you go into survival mode,

we've survived some amazing things.

Some guys have been on shipwrecks for 48 days

and bobbed in the ocean for three days.

So the human being can withstand a lot

as long as you've got a place to lie down,

air to breathe and something to drink.

And when you're in there, you get to that situation

where as long as you're breathing and you're okay,

then everything else doesn't even matter.

Doesn't come into your mind at all.

It's getting through every day.

And I carry that with me now.

I don't let things get me down.

And it's sort of like I don't lower myself to be affected

by the things that don't really matter.

And I think that's the easiest way of putting that.

I see.

So maybe when you wake up

and something doesn't go your way throughout the day,

you don't even allow your mind and emotions to identify

with that thing that came unexpectedly

and allow yourself to become affected by it.

Is that correct?

Absolutely.

There's ups and downs in life.

And if one day is not so good,

well, that's one of the bad days.

That's not a big thing.

If every day was wonderful

and it wouldn't be fun anymore.

And I always believed that.

And it helped me get through as well.

Get through that.

The Chapman, his life is full of balance.

So if there was too much rain, everything would flood.

And if there was no rain,

everything would dry up and shrivel away.

So I also believed that if I had to go through

all of that horror,

then there's gotta be great things coming out the other side.

And you have to believe that.

So that balance that you're talking about

is an important part of getting through all that.

When you had that moment in prison,

was there any moments that came after

that you can say were joyful?

Did you ever experience any moment of joy

after that in prison?

When you're in there,

you have to find even the smallest things

that make you happy.

What were they for you?

Just fooling around.

Just practical jokes and laughing.

You had to.

You had to find happiness in even the smallest things

that happen in prison.

And that's what kept us healthy.

In the first six years, Chapman,

I watched over 2,200 guys die

primarily from malnutrition and disease.

That's only in the prisons I was in

because there was no food.

There was no food outside of prison.

Nevermind in prison.

So there were people dying everywhere.

One day, we were playing cards

with a friend of mine on a tired floor

of the exercise yard.

And there were about 800 people in the exercise yard.

It was really crowded.

And a guy sitting next to me rolled over dead.

We just turned a little so we couldn't see him

until a prisoner hospital staff collected him.

That's how terrible it was in there.

There were people dying everywhere.

And you could smell dead people continuously day and night.

But that incident has always left me wondering

why that guy died and I didn't.

Why so many people lost their lives

and I had the privilege of living.

And I'll never really know why,

but it's made me humble and appreciate

every little thing about my life.

And there are things,

we have all in some way become desensitized

to things in our community at one time or another.

And I believe it's a surviving mechanism,

but it also reduces compassion and humanity.

And it's a fine line to tread when pushed so deeply.

But if you've lost the ability to empathize,

then you've lost what it means to be human.

It was a hell in there.

To get through that was,

it's hard to explain it on audio,

but the way we lived in there was horrific.

You see guys in the shower that looked like

the German concentration camps in the Second World War.

It was just the same.

There was skin and bone.

There was no food.

It was unbelievable.

Wow.

And were you in there

with a comparable amount of different ethnicities

or were you a standout

because you were one of the only white men in there?

We were 2,200 guys

in Chikarubi Maximum Security Prison.

We had three white guys

and the rest were black guys.

And the one white guy died in 2007.

So only two of us made it through there.

And then there were some mercenaries from South Africa,

but they were in the foreign section.

And because of my color or our color

and being a high profile prisoner

from who I was and my case,

I got a lot of privileges compared to the other guys.

And those were, if I had issues or problems,

I could ask to see the officer in charge.

And because I had a lawyer and an advocate,

I would get to see him.

But other guys who would ask,

they would just be shrubbed off.

So I didn't have privileges in the way we stayed

and everything, but if I had issues and I raised them,

they were addressed.

Interesting.

And that's primarily because you had a little bit

of financial means outside of prison

that could continue to fight for you while you were inside?

Yeah.

Something that's interesting is during the colonialization

of Rhodesia in those days,

which was done by the British mainly,

the British were very honest with the tribes back then.

So there was always an honesty and a respect

between the whites and the blacks.

The war wasn't to do with racial tension.

The war was to do with power struggles

and who could lead the country.

But that respect for each other, I went in there,

I still got treated like I was like an owner of a company.

And so that respect remained there all the time.

And for that, we're very, very lucky in Zimbabwe.

We have peace loving people.

And I think that's what separates us

from many, many other countries in Africa.

Interesting.

What kind of sicknesses did you endure

throughout your 10 years in prison?

I mean, did you come very close to death ever

due to the dysentery that you got or anything like that?

I got poisoned in 2011.

Apart from that, I'll get to that now,

I just suffered a lot of allergy problems

and they weren't really addressed well in prison.

So I regularly got chest infections and stuff,

but the TB was rife in prison.

There were thousands of guys that got TB

in the time I was in prison.

And then of course, HIV was quite rife as well.

So a lot of guys got from that,

especially when times are tough

and there was no food, et cetera.

But apart from that, I didn't have any normal,

just flu and stuff like that that everyone guessed,

but I just made, you know, when you have,

you realize in there that the most important things in life

can't be bought.

And that's your health, your loved ones and your friends.

When you go to prison, you walk in stark naked,

they strip you naked and you walk into that prison

with no clothes on.

They give you clothes inside there.

And when I say walk in, you walk in the main gates,

straight in amongst a thousand people

and you put clothes on in front of them.

Then getting back to that being poisoned,

I became very close to like some of the officer in charges

and stuff, and the guards are very, very good to me.

And there was, in 2010, so I went in in 2003.

In 2010, when I was in a medium security prison,

we had a huge cholera outbreak there.

And just to get on the death rates back to that,

in eight months, in 2008 and nine,

during the cholera outbreak at Arari Central Prison,

out of 1,200 of us prisoners, 432 died in eight months.

More than one third of us.

It was unbelievable.

That's when that guy sitting next to me rolled over dead.

Yeah, but after that, in March 2009,

Red Cross took over feeding.

Before that, Red Cross or any human rights people

were never allowed anywhere near our prison.

And then the death rate was so hectic

and it became more and more public.

So they started allowing Red Cross to feed us.

And March 2009, they started and the death rate dried up.

Within weeks, people stopped dying.

And then about a month, a year later, in 2010,

the Minister of Health came to the prison.

And the officer in charge and I were good mates

and we were about the same age.

And it was very, very hard to see him.

It's like seeing the manager of a huge company.

But I was at access to him through the pecking order

in prison that I told you about earlier.

And he came to me in the yard, in the exercise yard,

and he said, Russ, I want you to do it.

The Minister of Health is coming tomorrow

and I want you to do a talk for me.

So I said, well, can I tell him everything?

And he said, yeah, you can tell him everything.

And I did.

I told him, I had all the death rates in my head,

washing, you know, we had to wash our clothes

in the toilets, the broken gutters, the food, the lice.

I told him everything.

And afterwards he thanked me very much

and he asked me for my piece of paper

that I was reading from.

And then about 10 days later,

about 12 senators came to the prison.

And the officer in charge briefed me before night

and I gave them a talk as well.

And they were not very impressed with me

and asked me for my paper as well.

And not long after that, I was transferred to a farm prison.

So I was eight years in a closed prison,

which is a high security.

One was medium security

and then five and a half years was in maximum security.

But the farm prison that I went to is

run on trust completely.

So there's no fences or bars or anything.

It's all on trust.

And it was like heaven, we had our own beds.

It's the only prison in Zimbabwe that has beds,

but it's not really a prison,

it's just a farm that's run by prisoners.

And about two months after I was there,

I had guys that I looked after.

So we used to eat together and do things together.

And they were cooking,

because at that prison we were allowed to receive food

from our families and we had a fridge there.

So we kept the food in the fridge

and they would cook for me.

And one evening I was lying there

and suddenly I felt my hands going all tingly

and juices running into my mouth.

It was about five minutes after I'd eaten.

And I knew immediately that I'd been poisoned.

To get a long story short,

I ended up in intensive care for seven weeks in Arari.

And it's the closest I've ever been to dying.

I was finished.

And they never found out what it was.

They tested me for typhoid, for botulism, everything,

HIV, it went on and on.

14 vials of blood, stool and urine samples, everything.

And the only thing they came up with was

that my e-hemoglobin count,

which is like your antibodies fighting any foreign matter

that comes into your body.

It's like the army in you.

Your normal count is supposed to be zero to 100

and mine was 5,000.

They said if you weren't in the condition you're in,

you would never.

And I never gained my physical condition again

to where I was then.

And I'm a fitness freak so I train all the time

but I've never got back to that level.

And since then I've been asthmatic as well.

So it did hammer me quite hard.

So do you think there's any correlation then

between the senators who are not very happy with you

and you're getting poisoned?

That's the only thing I can put it to.

There's no other reason why anything would happen

like that to me.

And the reasoning being that they didn't want you

to get out and tell your story kind of thing?

That's exactly, that's the only conclusion I can put to it.

There's nothing else.

Interesting, that's wild.

Quite terrifying, yeah.

What's that?

Go ahead.

Yeah, I was just saying that me telling my story

is also quite a risk for me.

But there were a lot of very high politicians

and senior guys in government

that were very anti me being incarcerated.

And they tried to help me get out as well.

And it caused a lot of trouble for a lot of people.

Is there a lot of violence in those prisons?

Yeah, there's a lot of fighting.

We don't have that many stabbings

and the guards have got a lot more control

than they do in America.

So you do have rapes in there.

You have a lot of fighting and stabbings down again.

But it's pretty much controlled.

The guys are not, they are unruly bunch.

Some of the guys very unruly,

but generally they are controllable.

Interesting.

So then what year did you get out?

In 2013, April the 3rd, 2013.

What was the first thing you did when you got out?

Really want me to tell you?

Yeah, tell me please.

No, I had a barbecue with a whole bunch of mates,

about a hundred guys.

And it was just fantastic at my house.

It was beautiful.

Oh, that's wonderful.

So throughout your being incarcerated,

your family was able to maintain your businesses for you?

No, my business went broke in 2010.

So I still have my properties,

I've left a lot of debt and all the companies went broke.

This is my income now.

And you are a professional speaker now,

traveling the world or just throughout Zimbabwe?

I've been invited to travel, to speak all over the world,

but I'm battling with visas.

I'm working really hard now on a visa to America

and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna get it.

So I hope to visit you there.

That would be amazing.

Now, why would you be battling the visas?

Is it because they don't want you to get out of Zimbabwe

to tell your story?

No, it's because America turned me down.

The American embassy in Harare recommended a waiver for me

because with my criminal record,

I don't automatically qualify,

which to me is total discrimination.

I thought that if you had served your sentence,

you're supposed to be rehabilitated and normal.

That obviously there's discrimination on that.

So they recommended, they took my transcript

and read through it and then recommended a waiver,

but the home security in America rejected it.

And then I had lawyers in New York follow it up

and they said that they have to go by the court ruling

and if you're a dangerous,

if you're convicted of a dangerous crime like that,

they won't accept you.

So yeah, it was total discrimination in that side.

But I'm hopeful I'm going to get it.

I've been told that I've got a good chance

of getting a visa.

That's great.

Yeah, you'll be hearing from me.

I'm excited to be one of the first

to get your story outside of Zimbabwe.

That'll be great.

I've been invited to talk to some big places.

It's very exciting.

That is exciting.

So as of today, as of now,

you are on a circuit that you get paid to speak.

Is that correct?

And do you have any other income sources coming in?

I've got field guard training courses

that I do with a friend of mine

that I've known for about 40 years, Andy Connolly.

He owns a place called Antelope Park in Zimbabwe.

And there's a field guard training course

is called for Gaza,

Field Guards Association of Southern Africa.

And I'm an assessor, which is like an examiner.

So I take people on field guard training courses

for 50 days and then put them through some examination.

And they end up with a certificate

that for level one, level two and level three.

And that's going really well.

And it's, you know, I'm a farm boy by heart

and nature's in my blood.

So I'm loving that.

So that's another side of my business that I do.

Yeah.

And you are a professional hunter as well.

Is that correct?

Yeah, professional hunter and professional guard, yeah.

Do you hunt for your food?

Is that how you're putting meat on the table

or is that still just kind of for fun sport?

No, you know, when I left school,

let me go back to when I grew up.

I'm a farm boy and we grew up fishing and hunting.

And when we say hunting, just shooting impala,

poor ration meat.

We were allowed to shoot two impala a week

to poor ration meat for the labor on the farm.

And then if we saw a kudu bull, for example,

it was big news for, you know,

he got home that night and he told everyone

why I saw the kudu bull today.

And then the war came

and the wildlife got hammered and hammered more and more.

Remember in those, in the old days

when they settled in Rhodesia,

they, cattle was money, not game.

So the game, there was no value in animals.

So you could go out to a farmer's place

and if you wanted to shoot a kudu bull

or an eland or something, you'd shoot one

and you'd say, drop a hound quarter for me.

And there was no value in it.

It was just something that was eating the grass

and the grass was for the cattle.

And then after the war,

a group of us started realize the value

of professional hunting,

where people would come out and pay money to shoot animals

and we'd give the meat to the farmers as well.

So we started a campaign educating farmers

on the value of wildlife.

And we said to them, you know,

there were people that were shooting

sable antelope for ration meat, for example.

And every large cattle ranching

and private cattle ranch gave bonuses

for people that trapped leopard

because they were vermin.

Anything that killed cattle, you could destroy them.

And then we said, no, no, no, we'll pay you for them.

And then we'll give you the meat,

obviously not for the leopard,

but we said to them, as long as we can control

the off take and how it's taken off.

So we didn't take anything out of breeding herds,

only old males that went to pass their prime.

No females were taken at all of any species.

And then any money that went back to the farm

for the wildlife,

we made them start anti-poaching units,

which weren't heard of back when I grew up.

And then feeding game during droughts,

reintroducing the game that had been shot out.

And the game suddenly became so valuable

that hundreds and hundreds of farmers

went out of cattle farming into game farming.

And by 2000, there was more wildlife in Zimbabwe

than there's ever been from the hunting.

And then the land invasions came

and that was the end of the wildlife.

It's been hammered badly.

Interesting.

So yeah, you're very a conservationist.

Yeah.

And my whole life.

I see.

That's interesting.

And so how come you haven't just jumped back in that game

then as far as having like people come

and utilize your land for hunting?

Well, I don't have any land left for the hunting side

and also I'm over it.

It's not the same.

It's not.

And one of the things that destroyed it a lot,

Chopin, you won't really understand it,

but is in the old days around,

when you're sitting around a campfire,

it was the humor of being there out in the wild

in the bush and the camaraderie that came

with all the stories around the fire and everything.

And you go there now and everyone is sitting

on their cell phones and this Wi-Fi

and they're sending pictures to here and there.

And it's all about technology now.

It's not about the old raw feeling we used to get.

And it's all been lost.

It's so sad.

And I just don't want to be part of that anymore.

And then now I've been in it for 30 years since 1980.

So I'm over it.

I've done it.

I had all the wonderful times when everything was great

and I built it all up fantastic.

And now it's been destroyed and it just hurts too much.

And also I've been in isolation for so long.

And then when you go in the bush,

it's sort of back to isolation.

And I'm just feeling great meeting so many new people

and making such a difference.

And that's really what,

this is not all about making money for me.

It's about changing lives and making a difference.

And it's really helping so many people.

Yeah, it sure is, man.

Do you find it hard to relate to people

now that you're out of prison?

Do you have that sort of that repatriation syndrome

that a lot of ex-patriots get

when they come back to their home country

after being away for so long,

they just don't really kind of connect with society anymore?

Do you have that feeling ever?

No, I've never had that problem,

but I fit in with everyone, eh?

That's great.

That's good for you.

That's awesome.

Yeah, but there's something that I realized,

Chapin, is that we create our own prisons in life.

And I see it so clearly when I look at bad,

badly selected careers, unhappy marriages,

bad partnerships, and people being obsessed

with the ambition in the corporate world.

I mean, people are stuck in their, in ruts in,

and I just, they're in their own prisons

and they're not even in prison.

And it's so sad when I see it all,

and I just said to my daughter and my son,

just make sure when you get married,

I'm gonna be a granddad on Monday, by the way.

Don't put yourself in prison.

Make sure you know what you're doing.

Even in your career, make sure you do something you like,

you enjoy, don't have regrets when it's too late

and you can't get out.

Yeah, congratulations, by the way,

on your grandchild on the way.

That's awesome.

I have a little niece that I love spending time with.

It's awesome.

Beautiful.

I just have a few more questions.

Can you just take me through like a normal day for you?

Like, what do you do on a normal day right now, today?

Like, for example, what did you do?

And what brings you pleasure on a normal day?

Okay, I'm working with people at the moment,

Kevin, on interventions where we look at companies

and what's troubling the company

and ways that I can change that with what I went through

and write speeches that address those issues.

And it's just so challenging.

Every company's got different issues

and different directions that are not looking good.

And then we try and create a speech

relating to what I went through and how I got through it

and how that can change the way their futures can turn out.

That's really interesting.

So did you come up with that idea

or did someone approach you with that concept?

I'm working with an agent here called Unique Speaker Bureau.

And there are only 35 of our speakers.

They've interviewed over 1,000 people in the last three years

and they took on three.

So I'm very, very privileged to be part of Unique Speaker Bureau

and one of the co-owners is a guy called Michael Jackson

and he's known as the other Michael Jackson.

And he's a legend.

He's done over 2,600 keynote speeches around the world

and he's really, really taken a fascination to me

and he's my mentor, I just worship the guy.

And he's working with me and a lady called Bev Hancock

who's also got an amazing mind.

And the three of us are working on these speeches

to create for these interventions and I'm loving it.

So that's what I do during my day.

So my voice is a bit tired from talking,

speaking to myself in my stupid computer.

You have a beautiful voice, my man.

That accent, I'm sure, melts a lot of women's hearts

here in America when they hear it.

One more question, do you have any place

that people can find you online?

Do you have a website of your own

that you would like to kind of give a shout out to

so people can come hear more about you and your story?

Sure, my website is called Living in Chains

and then I've got some YouTube tips out.

Now I've only been talking since April last year

and I only signed up with Unique Speaker Bureau

two months ago.

So I've got another filmed or video speaker

speech coming up on Monday.

That'll be on YouTube as well.

But the YouTube clips at the moment,

they're only five minutes long.

There'll be longer ones coming out.

So you can find me on the website at Living in Chains

and my name, Rusty Labuskachni.

And then on Facebook as well.

I'm on Facebook and that'll be my name, under my name.

Cool, I'll put all these links up in the show notes

so it's easy for people to find you

and I hope this brings you more speaking engagements, my man.

It's been such a pleasure having you, Rusty.

Thank you so much for sharing your story.

I really appreciate you, my man.

Thank you, Jeff, and it's been wonderful

meeting you and chatting, but thank you so much.

Thank you for listening to Misfits and Rejects.

I hope this inspire you to think about your life situation

where you're at and possibly make a big decision

to choose something different for yourself

if you're unhappy with where you're at in life.

I hope these people that I interview inspire you

to go out, spread your wings,

try something new, to live a different lifestyle

that maybe your whole life people were telling you

was the wrong one, but when in fact it's the perfect one

for you, and I'll see you next time.