Caboose

I just travelled down to Abuja for tomorrow’s VSO Leavers’ Forum. They’ve still not quite explained what it’s for and what we’re going to be doing (helpful as apparently I’m facilitating) but it’s a good excuse to meet up with lots of people.

The journey down was uneventful and I was having trouble staying awake, as usual. It is always amazing to see the change in scenery caused by the little rain we’ve had so far. Bright green grass is starting to cover the deep red soil and the dust has washed off everything, making it all look fresh and new.

The bush taxi journeys have been more enjoyable since I got back from my holiday in April. At Schiphol I bought myself a set of noise cancelling earphones (Sony MDR-NC22, review), the idea being that I can listen to my iPod without having it turned up to ear-destroying volume. I was surprised to find that they actually work really well in cars, given that they’re really designed for use in aircraft. The tight-fitting earphones block out a lot of noise by themselves and the active noise cancellation circuitry is very effective at reducing the wind and road noise.

Abuja is changing rapidly, I think I notice the differences more since I moved to Kaduna. New road junctions, construction sites for new buildings and a rash of new street signs and signs indicating the way to major landmarks. Somewhere in the city there’s even a building site that’s the beginning of Abuja’s rail mass transit scheme.

While I was writing yesterday’s post I had to sit out on my doorstep to get a decent wireless signal. As I was typing away one of the conference centre staff strolled past to the grassy area opposite my house, stripped off and started having a shower. Seems odd given the huge number of empty rooms in the place, maybe management won’t let staff use them or maybe he just prefers showering outdoors.

Marion came round on Thursday night. I’d been out to the market earlier and had managed to buy some sheep-meat, so we had a mutton stew with potatoes and rosemary.

After that I thought we’d watch a film. I’d just put it on when NEPA took light. It had just started raining at the time, so this wasn’t too surprising. What was surprising was when water started pouring down all along the front wall of my living room. I fetched the mop and bucket and we tried to keep it back but there was a lot of water coming in.

I went to reception at the conference centre and managed to get one of the maintenance guys, who came straight back with me without any arguments or “I am coming”s. He looked at it and agreed with me that the gutter was probably blocked, so he went back to the main building to fetch a ladder. In the meantime Marion was still mopping furiously and moving everything away from the deluge.

When the maintenance guy got back he climbed up onto the roof and started poking at the gutter, there was a sudden rush of mud and leaves followed by a huge amount of water pouring down through the pipe. It must have kept pouring down for a couple of minutes. The water immediately stopped running down inside my house.

I gave him some money, to thank him for coming out so quickly and being willing to climb up a very rickety home-made ladder in the middle of a thunderstorm.

Afterwards Marion and I managed to get rid of most of the water through a combination of mopping and sweeping it out the front door with a brush. A towel across the doorway had kept all but a trickle from going through into the bedroom.

The problem was a combination of a lack of maintenance and poor design. I’d love to know who thought it’s a good idea to have a mostly sloping roof but with a large flat enclosed area at the front. There’s a big pipe to let water out but if that blocks the water builds up and eventually overflows inside the house. The “gutter” can probably contain a few hundred litres of water before overflowing.

All the other “chalets” at the conference centre had their gutters cleaned at the start of rainy season, but there’s always a bit of confusion over who’s responsble for maintenance of mine. It might be NTI’s estates department, who are unlikely to ever disturb themselves by doing any work, or it might be the conference centre’s maintenance staff. As a result the work wasn’t done.

If you think I’m being a bit harsh on the estates department, these are the same people responsible for the cooker that still gives me electric shocks after their utterly incompetent alleged electrician fixed it (after I’d waited weeks) and the disastrously bad plumbing in my kitchen (one tap has never worked and the other has water pouring out all around as well as out of the spout).

Hiromi will be leaving soon so she organised a leaving celebration at her house in Kagoro, in the south-east of Kaduna state. I didn’t have my camera with me, but Aine, Julia and Thessa should have some pictures.

Twelve of us appeared from various parts of northern Nigeria on Friday afternoon, meeting up at a hotel in nearby Kafanchan for dinner and drinks. Lots of people I hadn’t seen for a while were there, so it was a chance to catch up.

Hiromi had even arranged for a minibus to collect us from the hotel and take us back to her house. A few of us then made our way to a nearby bar for one last beer. We then managed to find somewhere for everyone to sleep, using the available beds, spare mattresses, karrimats and sofas.

Hiromi’s new housemate Nathan had only arrived in Nigeria the evening before and already his house was full of VSOs and one of them (me) sleeping on a mattress on his bedroom floor.

The next morning we were up fairly early, with most of us heading off into the nearby hills to visit a little village there. It seemed fairly cool when we started but we were all soon soaked in sweat. The start of the walk is along a viaduct built in the 70’s by the Kaduna water board, it carries the pipes from a spring/pond to the waterworks. After that it’s a fairly rocky path, levelling out and getting less rocky towards the village.

As usual, we were being passed regularly by local women and children carrying enormous loads up and down the hill.

Once we got up to the plateau at the top and passed through a natural arch of enormous boulders we were in the village of Dutse. The name means “mountain” or “rock” in Hausa and is a very common place name in northern Nigeria. It’s also very difficult to pronounce correctly, the “ts” is actually a sound that doesn’t exist in English, a sort of explosive, glottal-stop “s”, there’s a guide to Hausa pronouciation at UCLA’s excellent Hausa site.

We spent quite a while sitting in the sunshine in the village. There’s not a lot there but the views down on to the plains below were beautiful and the local children seemed to find us amusing. We could have bought fresh honey but nobody had brough anything to carry it in.

Going back down was much easier. Thessa, Nathan and I went via the market to pick up some akara for lunchtime snacks. Hiromi had managed to arrange (from up in the hills) for some water to be delivered so we could wash off all the sweat.

Hiromi also cooked for us, rice with Japanese and Korean curry sauces, a nice change from our usual food here.

In the evening a few people went out on reconnaisance missions to locate somewhere with cold beer (there had been no power for most of the day), eventually most of us made our way to a nice little local bar for a few bottles of Gulder (or Star). Beer always tastes better after an exhausting day.

Yesterday’s trip back to Kaduna was a little trying. We had to hang around in the motor park at Kafanchan for ages while the car filled. The driver wasn’t very good and seemed to have a disagreement with the staff at the filling station. Then we broke down not far out of Kafanchan.

We were glad when he managed to fix it, some problem related to the carburettor had been making the whole car stink of petrol. We then refuelled again along the way, with bitter complaints from the driver about the price of fuel.

It seems he was so unhappy about the price that he didn’t bother to buy enough, so we ran out at Maraba, just outside Kaduna. By a stroke of luck we were close to a filling station and they had fuel. More complaints from the driver.

By the time we finally reacher Kaduna I was hot and tired, so when the driver started taking both hands off the wheel to gesture while talking to some passengers I was maybe a little too forceful in requesting that he stop driving like an idiot.

One of the ways people deal with all the irritations of life in Nigeria is through humour. Not a lot of it is written down, most is just between people or live on stage.

Here’s a little story about the Nigerian space programme: Apollo 4-1-9. You might need the help of this Pidgin dictionary, see how much you can understand.

A few notes to help:

1. frovlem = problem — Hausa f and v are made with both lips and often sound like p and b respectively. When they’re speaking English many people don’t distinguish between the two.
2. NTA is the Nigerian Television Authority — the government TV station.
3. estacode — is civil service jargon for travelling expenses.

Speaking of irritations, the children from the junior staff quarters have recently started coming to collect water from the tap at the side of my house. This is because the rain hasn’t started properly yet and their wells are empty. The only problem is that they start early in the morning and have usually completely drained the tank by the time I want a shower.

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.

Watching TV in Nigeria requires a fair bit of determination. I get two different NTA channels, one usually showing national output and the other local. But I can’t predict which is going to be on which frequency.

Tonight national programmes were on the really weak frequency, so the picture’s terrible and occasionally fades out to nothing. The local channel was just showing adverts (the same three repeated) and ‘wise sayings’ (accompanied by distorted muzak) for half an hour.

On Sunday night I was bored and restless, so I thought I’d watch Wetin Dey, a new soap made by the BBC World Service Trust in partnership with NTA. I’d guess that NTA’s involvement is pretty much limited to transmitting the programmes as the sound and picture quality are fairly decent, so obviously none of their technical staff have been involved.

While I was waiting for it to come on I caught something more typical of NTA’s output, a government “documentary” (propaganda film) about the joys of Public Private Partnership in the education sector. I had to laugh when they started talking about how PPP had been a great success in the UK and USA.

It was the usual NTA style, almost inaudible sound, looking like it was filmed on somebody’s home camcorder (although I know they use professional equipment) and just reproducing what the ministry of education had told them to say.

The programme concentrated on the Unity Schools, founded back in the 60s/70s as the flagships of Nigerian secondary education. Now they’re crumbling and failing, despite huge amounts of money allegedly being allocated to them. Cut to the Federal Government College in Kwali (near Abuja): roofless classrooms, semi-derelict buildings, half-naked students, etc. Then cut to the principals office: she’s sitting there in a big shiny chair, office obviously recently redecorated and a big air-conditioner on the wall. She complains that the college’s generator has broken down, but I can guarantee that there’s a generator just for her office. I’d guess that a reasonable chunk of the money for refurbishing the school has been spent on her office, as well as being siphoned off by all the people higher up the chain.

In fact this documentary kept mentioning how much of the federal budget is spent on education and how poor the schools’ infrastructure is, without once coming close to asking where the money has gone. Instead it went on about how all these problems would be magically solved by bringing in the private sector.

One of the things that still surprises and annoys me is how few people here see it as corruption when the big oga is sitting in a comfortable, air-conditioned office with satellite TV and fridges when the rest of the institution is falling apart. It’s one of the reasons I like working at NTI, we don’t have that sharp divide.

On Saturday I finally got round to starting another one of my little projects: making a Kaduna bus map. Around 11am I set off from NTI to take each of the bus routes around the city and log the stops on my GPS.

I think quite a few of the drivers and conductors were fairly bemused by this baturi sitting in the front of the bus, scribbling notes in a little black book and occasionally pressing buttons on an odd blue device wedged under the windscreen.

Before I boarded the first bus I was hanging around at Kawo and saw a train approaching, with a single goods van behind the locomotive.

In the end I visited various parts of Kaduna I’d never been to before and gathered enough data to make the map. Now I just need to spend some time drawing it.

The last trip of the day was out to the end of Mando. I strolled back through the edge of town and had some suya for dinner. As I was walking along the road I saw this sign:

Just what everyone looks for in a bank: orangeness!

I just got back on Sunday from a two-week holiday back home. This was partly to get away from the elections in Nigeria, partly to attend my nephew Joseph’s first birthday party and also just as a holiday.

The KLM flight from Abuja to Amsterdam (via Kano) was comfortable enough. They have video on demand in economy on their new A330s, so I could occupy my night by watching films and TV shows. I’d used the online check-in to choose an exit row seat, so I had plenty of legroom.

Mum and Dad were waiting for me at Edinburgh, along with my niece Eve. She was a little bit shy at first, but remembered me from October and was soon chatting away.

I spent the first week in Stirling, at Mum and Dad’s. The pictures of Eve and Joseph are from the day Mum and I took them to a wildlife park. Eve is wearing a hedgehog mask on top of her head and Joseph is very good at serious looks.

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I was in Abuja at the weekend and had to stay for a meeting on Monday. As it turned out Monday was a public holiday (announced on Friday), so the meeting was moved to Tuesday. A whole day to hang around in Abuja, marvellous!

Karen and I occupied some time by going to the cinema, to see The Last King of Scotland. This was at Abuja’s (fairly) new cinema inside Ceddi Plaza, operated by a subsidiary of South African company Nu Metro. It’s just like a real cinema although we were reminded we were in Nigeria when the power went off twice and we had to wait for somebody to go and start the generator.

The film itself was very good. From a VSO perspective it’s interesting to see the changes in Nicholas Garrigan’s outlook, as shown through the use of colour and music in the film. He starts off thinking everything is lovely, colourful and full of life and has little tolerance of the more cynical outlook of Sarah Merrit.

Forest Whitaker as Amin is incredible, convincingly showing both the charm and menace of the man. Too many films turn those kind of characters into comic-book bad guys, without showing how it is that they manage to attract their followers.

(Stop here if you’ve not seen the film and don’t want to spoil the ending) (more…)