Caboose

After a good night’s rest at Amy’s house we had a late breakfast and Amy took us for a walk round Akassa. Although it was quite cloudy and damp (being rainy season) Akassa is a beautiful place, so we had frequent stops to take pictures. We also stopped along the way so that Amy could check for messages on her phone. Coverage is very poor so you have to stand on a jetty and hold your phone up in the air to have any chance of getting a signal.


Our first stop on leaving the house had been one of the local shops, to buy umbrellas. Only Tracey had thought to bring one with her but she’d left it in a taxi in Abuja. They came in very handy as the rain got heavier as we approached the Akassa Development Foundation’s training centre.

This is where Ine and her counterpart Timi have set up a resource centre for the nursery and primary schools run by the Akassa Womens’ Association (AKWA). The centre also contains an internet centre provided by the French Government ADEN project, a classroom for teaching sewing and rooms for holding workshops.

Ine has been working on introducing the Montessori method of teaching to the AKWA nursery schools. This is a huge shift from the standard Nigerian approach of putting young children into rows of benches in a classroom and trying to forcibly teach them how to read and count, child-centred teaching is not common here.

After a lunch of toasted sandwiches and cup-a-soup (Ine’s friends have been sending her packets of soup and sauces from the Netherlands) Ine took us off on a walk. In the first picture below the little hut over the water to the right is one of the many pier latrines.

Many of the houses in Akassa are made of palm thatch, in the photo below left you can see one being built. Other houses are made of wood and corrugated metal sheeting, or even concrete. As Akassa is made of sand there is no gravel to put in the concrete, so periwinkle shells are used instead. Most of the waterlogged areas are inhabited by (difficult to photograph) crabs and mudskippers, there’s a mudskipper in the middle of the right-hand photo.

The BBC visited Akassa back in 1999, you can read their reports and listen to the programmes: The Akassa approach and Troubled times in the Niger Delta