Caboose

We took the kittens to the vet last night. They needed their deworming and rabies injection and we wanted to discuss neutering. We had also been increasingly certain that Tracey and Sue were in fact male.

They were registered and wormed, we’ll have to go back for the rabies jabs and book them in for neutering. The neutering will be much cheaper because they are both male. This means that they need to be renamed. We’ve decided to adopt Jenny’s suggestion of calling them Russell and Evans (the surnames of Tracey and Sue).

Father Noel is leaving Nigeria for a while, heading back home to Ireland and spending some time in Kenya. Karen’s parents were visiting too and she wanted to show them Kabba. So on Friday afternoon a convoy left Abuja for Kabba. There was the usual drinking and wearing of silly hats:

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I spent part of this afternoon wandering around taking pictures of people working at Radio Nigeria. My first stop was the newsroom, while they were busy putting together the 1600 news.

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My little sister got collars for the kittens and posted them out to me, so we can now tell which one is which at a glance:

Tracey has the glittery collar and Sue has the fluorescent yellow one with red butterflies.

Dave, Marebec and I took Friday off work and met Phyllis horribly early in the morning for the eight-hour trip up to Sokoto. The early start was both so that we can complete the journey in daylight and because the cars at Jabi motor park fill quicker early in the morning.

Before long we were off, with the road gradually deteriorating once we passed Kaduna. The bush on either side was noticeably greener than in February and we saw quite a few camels and donkeys along the road once we got further north. We also had an unexpected (but short) stop in Zamfara state when one of the car’s tyres burst.
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I stayed with Kay at her house in Kubwa (one of Abuja’s satellite towns) last night. Mary joined us for a lovely meal and to watch a DVD. Although most of the rubble has been cleared up you can still see the scar’s resulting from the recent demolitions in Kubwa. Opinions are still divided over how good an idea it is to go around demolishing all the illegal buildings.

In the morning I headed down to the expressway junction to meet Alex and several others for a picnic up at Usuma dam. After some interesting driving through huge muddy puddles and into the bush (in a VW Golf) we found a nice spot and started the barbecue.

While we were waiting several local women walked past us, on the way to the reservoir to do their washing. A Fulani boy also turned up with his herd.

Around the time the food was ready it started to rain, getting heavier and heavier until we were all huddled in the cars. The Fulani boy stayed standing out in the open, watching the animals.