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[Nigeria]Nigerian glossary

My last Kabba weekend?

Written by kevin

It has been a long time since my last weekend in Kabba, so I was glad when the Kabba Boys got in touch to invite me again. A large group of VSOs, Irish embassy staff and various others descended on Kabba for conversation, beer, crazy golf and even hungover hiking.

The Kabba Boys are moving to Bauchi later this year and their final Kabba party will be after I leave Nigeria, so this was probably my last weekend there. The next few months are going to be full of “last”s, building up the combination of sadness and excitement that comes with finishing something.

The journey back was a little eventful. We took a bus from Kabba to Abuja, only to discover that it actually terminated at Zuba (imagine boarding a bus for London and being dumped at Heathrow). I couldn’t find a car going directly to Kaduna, so I joined the others in heading into town for an early dinner at AJ’s. Houmous and shawarma wrapped in flat bread made up for missing lunch.

I then had to get to the motor park, so walked along to Banex junction. There a man approached me and greeted me, as often happens. Next he asked for some money, this doesn’t happen very often but isn’t too unusual. Then he started getting aggressive, very aggressive, grabbing my arm and gesturing aggressively in my face (the standard thing here is to push your hand, palm-first with fingers spread out, towards someone, stopping just in front of their face). I remained calm and just told him that I wasn’t going to give him any money. He must have noticed, despite being very drunk, that I’d shifted my position and was starting to consider just how hard I’d have to hit him with my umbrella to make him give up. I started to walk away. He grabbed my rucksack and was dragging along behind me when one of the bystanders finally intervened and escorted him off. A little shaken, I hopped on a bus to Jabi and boarded the Kaduna car.

At the junction of Airport Road and the northern expressway there’s a very bad junction. You come down off a flyover on a stupidly tight curving road to join the expressway. The car in front of us was going too fast, left the road, hit the ditch between the carriageways, flipped and ended up on its roof in the wrong carriageway. Our driver stopped, opened my door (the inside handle was missing) and I ran over to the crashed car, it looked vaguely comical upside-down with its wheels still spinning. Just as we got there the driver got out, there was nobody else inside and he seemed fine. As we left he was sitting beside his car with his head in his hands, surrounded by the usual crowd of the curious.

Nothing much happened on the rest of the journey. I may have been a little snappy with the usual crowd of “drop by car” drivers waiting to hassle incoming passengers. Back at the house, to unpack, repack for tomorrow’s trip to Bauchi and get some rest.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 20:08 and is filed under friends, travel, VSO.

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