Caboose

I just spent a couple of days working in Bauchi. My colleague Niyi and I had to install some software and set up some computers at the North-East zonal office, as part of the plan to decentralise some of NTI’s enormous data entry activities.

We took a bush taxi from Kaduna on Monday morning, making the mistake of choosing the back row. Along the (atrocious) road to Jos my head kept banging off the roof. Getting to Jos took quite a while because of the many police and army checkpoints, each one requiring the usual twenty Naira dash before allowing us to pass. After Jos the road is much better, so the rest of the journey wasn’t too exciting (I’ve become quite casual about ridiculous near-death overtaking manouevres).
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The New Gong magazine has a website with various interesting articles and pictures. Because of my interest in the history of Nigeria my attention was drawn to one about Mungo Park, often claimed to be the “discoverer” of the river Niger.

The article points out that he himself never claimed the discovery and that he was very glad of the hospitality of the African people. For once an old British explorer comes out as not being a monster, interested in people and their lives rather than glory and empire.

It has been a long time since my last weekend in Kabba, so I was glad when the Kabba Boys got in touch to invite me again. A large group of VSOs, Irish embassy staff and various others descended on Kabba for conversation, beer, crazy golf and even hungover hiking.

The Kabba Boys are moving to Bauchi later this year and their final Kabba party will be after I leave Nigeria, so this was probably my last weekend there. The next few months are going to be full of “last”s, building up the combination of sadness and excitement that comes with finishing something.
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I recently spent a couple of Saturdays riding around Kaduna with my GPS and a little notebook, puzzling and confusing many bus drivers and passengers. The results are now ready: The Kaduna Bus Map!
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If you want to print a copy you’re better off using the PDF version, it prints out nicely on a single A4 page. I had terrible problems finding a business centre that had a colour printer, ink and electricity all at the same time.

Update 13/6/07: Corrected a typo in the map legend, it’s “Tudun Wada” not “Tudun Wasa”. My original version would mean something like “hill of dancing/sports”.

Update 18/6/07:Corrected a colour mismatch between the “Tudun Wada” route on the map and in the legend. I originally made it yellow but changed to magenta so it would be easier to see in print.

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.

A couple of years ago I went on a trip to Barcelona and posted some pictures, including a panorama of the Sagrada Familia church:

That picture ended up in Google image search among others and lots of non-technical bloggers seem to have chosen to use it if they want a picture from Barcelona. The only problem is that they don’t save it to their own website, they link to the copy on my site.
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Every once in a while I get an email asking to use my photos. The first was from Satan’s Penguins (their own website seems to have vanished), a Swedish heavy-metal band.

They ended up using several of my Antarctic pictures on the cover of their album “Birds of Darkness“. The link’s to a review (found by a Google search today) that mentions “On the front cover, four shrouded penguins stand against the sunset.”, that would be these penguins:

(There are actually five penguins, the third from the left isn’t just very fat)

I’ve also provided photos for some educational activities in various places and a book about Greece published by the Danish Geografforlaget.