Caboose

Abuja is a famously dull city and most of the time it seems to be government policy to keep it that way. The minister for the Federal Capital Territory, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, has been responsible for demolishing most of the (admittedly illegally-built) buildings that formerly provided useful services to the inhabitants of the city.

Next month the government have organised something more constructive, the Abuja Carnival, organised by the team responsible for the Notting Hill Carnival in London.

I’m still here, the past couple of weeks have just been very quiet. This is mostly because several people have been away.

The new batch of volunteers arrived yesterday, so I popped across to the Crystal Palace to say hello. It’s one of those weird things where I’ve been in touch with most of them by email but never met them before.

Alex took us on another picnic on Sunday, this time travelling a bit further to Gurara Falls. The falls are usually listed as one of Abuja’s tourist attractions despite being about an hour away to the west.

We left Abuja in sunshine, drove through some very heavy rain and arrived at the falls just in time for the rain to hit there. The good thing about all the rain was that the falls were very impressive.

After sitting in a small shelter for a while the rain eased off and we tried to find a suitable spot for the picnic. The rain kept coming back though and Alex’s usual spots were underwater so we retreated to the car. After eating some houmous and lebanese bread in the car we drove back to Alex’s house, where he cooked the chicken we were supposed to barbecue at the falls.