Caboose

Mum and Dad came to visit me for a week, it’s taken me a little while to sort out my pictures and write this. (The picture is of Mum and Dad at the Farin Ruwa waterfall)

(more…)

My parents are arriving tonight and will be here for a week so I probably won’t be updating this for a while or checking my email very often.

To celebrate the end of fasting many towns in Nigeria hold a Durbar. In the past this was the Emir’s review of his troops, with cavalry regiments contributed by each district. Alex originally organised for a few of us to travel up to Kano for the Durbar there but in the end he couldn’t make it because of work commitments. Instead his sister Viviane joined Dave, Marebec, Kate and myself for the long and dusty journey north on Wednesday.

Once we had checked into the hotel we had a late lunch at a Lebanese bakery near the Central hotel then headed to Kano’s famous Kurmi market. The market was very quiet because of the public holiday, many of the stalls were closed, but we still had a quick walk around. We also went for a quick stroll along the street outside.

(more…)

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.

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:

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.