Mariana van Zeller

So that was sort of a kickoff to all of it.

It was in Niger, so it's in the Sahel region of Africa.

The U.S.

has actually a military presence.

Remember a few years ago when there were these four U.S.

Marines that were killed in the Sahel in Niger and nobody even knew they were there?

Well, there's actually over 1,000 troops stationed in Niger.

And we were there in a little town called Agadez, which is in sort of the southern border of the Sahara Desert.

And we were doing a story about gold mining.

So the story itself was incredible.

We had to, you know, we had a military convoy with us because it's an incredibly dangerous part of the world.

You've got terrorism.

You've got ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram.

You've got kidnappers, so it's very, very dangerous.

We'd gone there with the permission of the government, but only if we had to have a military convoy with us at all times.

So we're talking about four armored trucks with lots of trained soldiers that every time we stopped, they'd get out of the trucks and basically point their guns all around.

They were very well trained.

A lot of them are actually trained by the American military.

And we went out into the desert and visited these gold mines, which are crazy.

It was an eight-hour off-roading into the desert to arrive at these illegal, unregulated mines.