Caboose

[Requested by Catherine]

0730 Alarm goes off. Get up, shower, dress, make porridge and Milo (using powdered milk) for breakfast. Pour last night’s boiled water into the filter and start boiling some more (using the kettle to get it up to boiling and then ten minutes on the stove to kill the beasties). Fill up plastic bottles with filtered water. Dump the food waste bin contents in the heap at the other end of the compound.

0855 Leave the house and wander over to the office, greeting security guards along the way. Get to office, greet Jonah, Tayo and anyone else who’s around. Plug in the laptop and check email. Research software and hardware needed for various projects, provide advice on technical issues, attend meetings.

1230 Wander back to the house for lunch. Once a week or so go to one of the chop houses at Radio House instead.

1315 Switch on the pump to move water from the bottom tank to the roof tank. Stand by the switch and wait for the tank to overflow, switch off the pump (there’s no other way of telling when the tank is full).

1330 Wander back to the office. Doing the same things as before lunch. Go up to the twelfth floor (location of the newsroom and studios), which involves queueing for some time waiting for whichever of the four lifts are working today.

1730 Pack up laptop, leave the office, walk back to the house. Cook dinner (or do the dishes if it was Marebec’s turn to cook). Pour the morning’s water into the filter, boil more water. Listen to the radio, read, watch TV.

2200 Go to bed. Bedtime is earlier if there is no light.

Of course the times and what I do vary from day to day but that would be a fairly typical day.

I’ve added an illustrated glossary so that when you encounter a Nigerian word like okada you can find out what I’m talking about.

Admittedly there’s only one illustration so far, but I’m planning to go round taking some photos of everyday things soon.

While I was in Kabba I bought some fabric and once I was back in Abuja I took it to my tailor to get some trousers made, here’s the result:

One of the things that makes life in Nigeria more interesting is the process of ordering food at one of the many chop houses (informal-economy restaurants). You usually end up playing a guessing game that’s oddly reminiscent of the Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch.

The main rule of the game seems to be that the waiter/waitress must never reveal what food they actually have except in answer to a specific question. So, for example, asking “what food do you have?” won’t work. Instead you have to ask about each individual item that may or may not be available: pounded yam, rice, stew, egussi soup, white soup, garri, semovita, draw soup, …

A second rule is that most things should be off or that they should have just run out.

There’s a slight variation of this game played in the fast food restaurants of Abuja. These look like normal Western fast food places and have a large illuminated menu. Of course, most of the things on the menu are either never available or are not available right now. The staff won’t tell you what’s not available or list what is, instead you have to keep guessing until you find something they actually have.

I’ve been meaning to do some baking for a while. The bread here isn’t great, far too sweet and suspiciously yellow.

It took me a while to assemble the bits and pieces I need, loaf tins in particular seem to be very difficult to buy here. Then I had to summon up the enthusiasm and spare time for baking.

Yesterday afternoon I finally got round to it.

The end result was surprisingly good, especially considering that our oven doesn’t have any temperature settings (there is a little bit of variation in between on and off but not much). The tins are a bit of an odd shape but the bread had a nice crispy crust and a soft inside without huge air bubbles. It’s much harder work mixing up the dough without a mixer, so this morning I have aching shoulders.

Now we just need to get something to put on the bread…

The recent lack of updates and email has been due to the internet connection at work getting less and less reliable until on Friday it gave up completely. It seems to be OK today, so I’m catching up.

This weekend I joined a large group of other VSOs and employees of various other organisations for a trip to Kabba, Kogi state.

We left work on Friday at lunchtime. The journey takes over three hours, the road from Abuja to Lokoja is known for accidents and the road from Lokoja to Kabba for potholes and armed robbers. Luckily Marebec and I had managed to cadge a lift with Ronan and some others in an air-conditioned LandCruiser, much more comfortable than public transport!

As you travel south from Abuja the landscape gets noticeably greener and just before Lokoja you cross the Niger river:

The purpose of the trip was to visit Fathers Noel and Leo, both missionaries in Kabba. They were having a party to celebrate Leo’s birthday at the centre where they both work. Here’s a picture of the Diocesan Pastoral Centre and another of the house containing the infamous Hillie’s Bar.

(more…)

Got an email from the VSO programme office on Thursday, to tell us that one of the VSO drivers, Tadjudeen, had been killed in a car accident. I didn’t know him but he certainly seems to have been well liked by both programme staff and volunteers. He leaves a wife and five children.

There was some good news in the email. Kayode, one of the programme managers, was also in the car but escaped with cracked ribs and bruising.

People at home worry about illnesses, coups and other dramatic problems but travelling on the roads is the most dangerous thing we do here.

Since we moved into the house I’ve been worried about the amount of water we’ve been getting through. Even if no taps are on if I left the valve from the tank open the whole tank (several hundred litres) would empty in less than an hour.

The most obvious problem was that both toilets had faulty float valves, so they never stopped filling. The plumber came round to fix that yesterday and it became obvious that there was another problem elsewhere. I went for a wander round the back of the house this morning and noticed this:

I’m amazed that I hadn’t noticed this before, a pipe sticking out into mid-air with water pouring out of it! The electricians were working round the back yesterday, so it’s possible that they moved something that was previously covering the pipe. On the other hand, maybe I was just being really stupid.

Once this is fixed we should have higher water pressure so the showers might even start working!

The other week I decided I needed some more shirts, so that I could actually make it through a week without having to do washing. I wandered off down to the Area 7 Shopping Centre (just down the road), bought some fabric and found a tailor. So for ₦700 (£2.70) he sewed the fabric up into a very nice shirt.

He did such a good job that I asked him to make up some other fabric into a traditional Nigerian outfit, I went and collected it yesterday:

You can’t really see the embroidery in the picture, men really seem to go in for fancy fabrics and lots of ornamentation on their clothes here.

The outfit is all very loose and comfortable, in fact it feels more like pyjamas than something you’d wear to go out. Now I just need an occasion to wear it…

I spent the weekend up in Kaduna, a couple of hours north of Abuja. We were visiting Paul, a Canadian volunteer who has been training teachers at the school for the deaf there. He’s finishing soon so he had organised a leaving party. Here’s a picture of Paul in his house and a random street scene from Kaduna.

Mary and I set off on Friday afternoon, took a taxi out to Jabi motor park and quickly found a bush taxi going to Kaduna. It was a pretty comfortable journey, they only put three of us in the middle row of seats rather than the usual four. As we approached Kaduna one of the windscreen wipers broke (it was raining a bit), so the driver switched them off and obviously couldn’t see very well. When Mary complained his solution was to speed up so the water was blown off the windscreen.

Paul met us at the bus stop and walked us back to the school, where he is living in a converted office. Tracy (from Gindri) and Karen (from Jos) arrived shortly after us.

Friday night was quite relaxed, we headed out to a bar called PDP (the same as Nigeria’s dominant political party, not sure why), had very spicy fish and chips and washed it down with a few beers. At the bar we met up with various other people, including Joanne (formerly VSO with FRCN, now with the BBC in Kaduna) and Henrietta (working with Marebec at FRCN).

(more…)