Caboose

Here are some pictures of my house in Kaduna. I moved in on the 7th but since then I’ve been busy with a combination of work and another dose of malaria. The house was originally just another one of the suites at the NTI Conference Centre but they’ve built a kitchen and refurnished it.

This is a panorama of my living room. The front door is to the right of the fridge, the door to the kitchen is to the left of the TV, then the bathroom door and the door to my bedroom. The tiles are new, I requested that the carpets be removed as they’re impossible to keep clean in this climate.

This is my kitchen, all new and with a nice gas and electric cooker.

Last of all is my bedroom:

The house is very nice and the few teething troubles are gradually getting sorted out. The most irritating thing is the poor water supply, the conference centre’s plumbing is very bad so I only get water for a couple of hours each day.

Sunday 19th March

I arrived into Abuja at around 8pm but the heat was still almost overpowering as I stepped out of the horribly air-conditioned plane.  The immigration desk officials were efficient and very friendly (thank god the Americans haven’t been training them!) and I was soon collecting my luggage and meeting Kevin.

As it was dark I could not see much as we drove into Abuja and to Radio House where we would be staying with Marebec for the night.  I met Marebec and Russell before gratefully heading to bed although 5am alarm call had been set!

Monday 20th March

Up very early and off the Jabi motor park (which is actually called some other name which no one actually calls it) to get a car to Kaduna where Kevin now lives.  My mum and dad had prepared me for the state of the cars and I think being half asleep made me distinctly relaxed about the safety of these vehicles.  We got a car quickly and were soon heading off.

We headed to NTI when we reached Kaduna and greeted the many security guards before dropping off the rucksacks in Kevin’s room before a greeting tour of all the staff in NTI, many who appeared to be asleep.  We then went into Kaduna for a look around the market and the city itself.  It was overwhemingly busy with people and traffic everywhere in no apparent order, not at all like British cities.

That evening we met some of the other VSO’s in the Air Force Club for a few beers and then for some dinner in the form of suya, which was unbelievably spicy, so much so it brought tears to my eyes!  It was then a white knuckle ride on the motorbikes to get a car back to NTI.
(more…)

I haven’t updated this site for a little while because I was away. I had a VSO conference in Abuja for a few days and then my little sister came to visit for a couple of weeks.

She’s going to be writing about her visit to Nigeria here and I’ll also be putting up some pictures of my new house, which I moved in to on Friday.

Jan joined me on Saturday morning for a walk in the bush behind the NTI campus. It’s quite nice up there, very peaceful given how close to Kaduna and the Kaduna-Zaria Expressway you are.

(more…)

After months of people complaining that these days you don’t get Harmattan’s like you used to, the Harmattan has come.

Yesterday evening the wind picked up and the air became full of dust. This morning it’s just the same, as you can see in the picture. There’s a definite chill to the wind as well.

I decided shortly after moving here that a bike would be a good way of getting around the local area and going for trips into the bush. Last week I wandered into town to find the one shop that sold bikes with gears. Unfortunately it had vanished and people at several other shops insisted that bikes with gears don’t exist in Nigeria, I had obviously imagined the other shop.

After a while I found a little bicycle shop tucked away beside a motorbike shop, with a little old Hausa man who spoke very little English but managed to show me what thay had, including the magnificent Hamilton Storm 18-speed mountain bike. He refused to negotiate on price, but NGN 13000 was a good price anyway, so I bought it.
(more…)

When I move to a new place I like to walk around to get my bearings and develop a feel for where I am. So on Saturday I decided to go for a stroll around Kaduna.

After a morning of washing clothes I took a car to Kawo junction and then a minibus to the French Café. I had lunch there as a little treat after last weeks illness. They have a lovely bakery and even real coffee. The prices for the bakery products are reasonable, NGN 120 for a cheese croissant and NGN 150 for a mini-pizza, but they charged NGN 200 for a Sprite (usually NGN 35 in Kaduna) and NGN 300 for an espresso. Nearby was this sign:

(more…)

On Tuesday I wasn’t feeling very well, it started with an entertaining case of the runs and then I just started feeling generally ill. I spent the afternoon sitting around my room at the conference centre, feeling achy and alternately hot and cold.

Yesterday morning things hadn’t improved, so I went to the NTI clinic. The doctor decided I probably had malaria, plus something else that had caused the diarrhoea. He gave me some tablets for the malaria, told me to increase my dosage of doxycycline to see if that killed off the gut bugs and sent me to the on-site lab for a blood test.

The blood test results came back this morning and it’s definitely malaria. It looks like it was caught early and the tablets seem to be working, I’m feeling much better today. I’m not sure if the taking my malaria prophylaxis every day has reduced the severity of the malaria or if it’s just luck, but I’ll certainly keep on taking my daily doxycycline.

I’m convinced the cause was the large number of mosquitoes in my room, due to the huge gap between the air-conditioner and the wall. I’ve been spraying bug spray around every night but as soon as it wears off more of them come in. I complained to the hotel and they did nothing. Instead I bought a newspaper and used it to fill in the gap, looks like it was too late though.

Getting malaria is probably some kind of VSO Nigeria rite of passage, like falling in a drainage ditch (which I haven’t, yet).

I’ve now been working for NTI for just under a week and am settling in. There was the usual tour and introductions to everyone, this time I took notes and pictures to help me remember who’s who. I have my own office (below left) in one of the lovely buildings at the NTI campus outside Kaduna. Each building is arranged around a courtyard, from the outside they look like something out of a 70’s sci-fi film.

I’m living at the NTI’s conference centre, also on site. At the moment I’m in one of their suites, waiting for my permanent apartment to be finished. The conference centre is basically an on-site hotel and seems to mostly be used by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation for their training courses. Like many buildings in Nigeria it looks like it was very nice about twenty years ago but has since had little maintenance and basic services such as running water don’t work most of the time.

On the other hand my room is quite comfortable, has a/c and a TV. The permanent apartment is another one of these suites, they’re currently building a kitchen and will apparently be ready in about two weeks. You can see it at the right of the photo below.

At work I’m now thinking about my workplan for the first few months, working out what I need to know and who to ask. So far there seems to be plenty of work to be done and expectations are high.

I’ve been meaning to do some research into road accident fatalities in Nigeria and have finally got round to it. People keep going on about how dangerous it is to fly here but I suspected the roads are much more dangerous.

Of course, statistics are difficult to get hold of and usually unreliable. The Federal Road Safety Commission has a little bar graph with some statistics (below). If you zoom in you can just make out that the deaths figure for 2004 was 5524, 15 people per day.

Take Bellview crash in October last year, in which all 117 passengers and crew died. The road deaths (from 2004) are equivalent to 47 Bellview crashes, nearly one a week. Given that it’s not uncommon for pedestrians or motorcyclists killed on the roads to be left lying I’d say it’s safe to assume that the road deaths are under-reported.

As a comparison, in the UK in 2004 the number of people killed on the roads was 3321 (source: Road Casualties Great Britain 2004). Given populations at that time of 59,834,300 for the UK (source: Office for National Statistics) and 128,709,000 for Nigeria (source: Unicef) that means that in 2004 about 1 in 18000 of the UK population and 1 in 23300 of the Nigerian population died in car crashes.

I’ve tried (but failed) to find statistics so I can compare the number of vehicles on the roads in each country.