Caboose

I was walking across to the office this morning as the gardeners were spreading out across campus to start work for the day. One of the younger guys must have been left behind, he was running to catch up with some of the others. As he ran along the road, he leaned over and dragged his machete along the tarmac.

For me the sight and sound of the young gardener sharpening his machete immediately reminded me of film of the Rwandan genocide, showing how easily perfectly normal words, sounds and actions acquire hideous new meanings. It really did send a shiver up my spine.

I’m sitting in a car in the motor park in Bauchi, waiting for one more passenger before we can leave for Kaduna.

I spent the weekend at Yankari national park, we were lucky and actually saw some wildlife.

I’m writing this on my phone to pass the time sitting in the terrible heat.

My lovely IBM ThinkPad laptop seems to be dead, it suddenly turned off last night and won’t come back on.

This means that I’m temporarily without access to my saved emails and most of the rest of my personal stuff. I’m hoping the hard disk is still OK and I can get all the useful data off it but until then I won’t be checking my email very often.

Looks like it’s just as well I’m taking a holiday back to the UK in April, the laptop is still under warranty and I’d rather have IBM/Lenovo’s UK people deal with it than send my laptop to the “service provider” in Lagos.

This weekend a group of us headed off to visit Jenny, Karin and Sue in Akwanga. They’re all working at the college of education there, trying to improve the standard of teacher training.

The main activity was a trip to the waterfalls at Farin Ruwa:

Six of us left Abuja early on Saturday, squeezed into a car at Kabo motor park. Although we had to pay for two empty seats this actually just meant that there were only two people in the back row and nobody had to sit on the gearstick!
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Test posting by WAP. This is a quick test of posting via wapblogger.

Notes: The title is generated automatically by taking the first five words, it would be better if it had stopped at the period. Here’s the link for wapblogger.

Just found Matthew Pariss’ articles from his time on Kerguelen.

I knew he had been there and read a couple of cuttings from the Times they kept in the bar. In fact his mind-blowingly arrogant comments in the visitor’s book at Port Jeanne d’Arc wound me up no end.

The articles are well written though and he does seem to have fallen for the place, I can understand why and I was only there for a month.

I’m off to see Morvern Callar later, I liked the book so I’m curious to see how the film has turned out.