Caboose

Got a call from Alex this afternoon asking if we wanted to head out to visit Bwari pottery. Shortly afterwards he arrived with Tracey and Karen and Marebec and I joined them for the drive out to Bwari.

Bwari is one of Abuja’s satellite towns, with lots of housing and some government organisations there. The pottery was set up following the example of the Pottery Training Centre at Abuja (renamed Suleja when the new capital was created here). The buildings are of traditional construction, with grass roofs, and the site is very peaceful.

We watched one of the potters at work and Marebec had a go with his assistance.

There’s an interesting article about pottery in the Abuja area here.

Tracey will be leaving Nigeria next week now that her placement has finished. She’s organised a series of leaving parties in various places.

On Saturday morning Bob’s (heavily loaded) car left Abuja for Jos, picking up Jenny and her friend Rachael in Akwanga along the way. After a nice lunch we spent the afternoon wandering around town, doing a bit of shopping. Jos is much cheaper than Abuja for almost everything, I picked up some honey, video CDs and a thermos flask which I’m planning to use for making yoghurt.

Saturday night was great, the party was at the PW life camp. They provided lovely food (real sausages!) and plenty of drink. There was much dancing and singing until the early morning.

Festivities restart next week with a party at Bob’s place on Saturday, one at the Abuja PW life camp on Sunday and a picnic on Monday.

Last night I went to the Mummy market at Abacha barracks (officially Mogadishu barracks these days) with Medel and Marebec, it’s one of the best places in Abuja for grilled fish. They have an open area with the half oil drum fish and chicken grills surrounded by open-air bars.

While we were eating it started to rain, getting heavier and heavier with bright flashes of lightning all around. The people running the fish stalls set up brightly coloured umbrellas to cover their grills, which were lit up beautifully by the bare bulbs they use for light. It was a shame I only had my phone with me, with a proper camera it would have made a fantastic picture.

To make things even better a three-piece band were playing in our bar, the whole thing was one of those moments that remind me why it’s so good to be in Nigeria.

Some of the bits of equipment that should have been in the house when we moved in are finally starting to arrive. Yesterday we got our table and chairs:

This means we don’t have to eat with plates balanced on our knees any more and we can sit outside in the evening. We’re just waiting for wardrobes now.

[updates below]

I’ve not written much about techy, computery stuff recently, but this morning I’m angry.

I’d been looking for a way to keep the numbers on my mobile phone synchronised with my Sony Clie PDA. SonyEricsson’s software would only synchronise with Microsoft Outlook, and I didn’t want to install that huge lump of bad software just to store phone numbers. Instead I found a shareware program called Mobile Master. I tried it out and then paid £18 to register it.

At first it seemed to work fine, synchronising my phone with Palm Desktop and so with my PDA. Then I noticed that it had subtly corrupted my PDA’s address database. All the fields were in the wrong places and people’s surnames had been replaced by some kind of ID code. I reported the problem to Mobile Master’s authors and waited for a reply.

Update: I’ve now received a reply to my problem report and an apology for how long it took. Unfortunately it’s too late as I’ve uninstalled the software and am using Outlook and SonyEricsson’s software.

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After all the excitement of the Osun festival I needed something to do on Sunday (other than the washing). So when Alex asked Dave and I if we were interested in going for a walk we said yes straight away. Alex us and his friend Amy out of Abuja city, through a small town called Mpape to some local hills. It was great to actually do a bit of walking in the countryside, you could hardly tell you were just outside Abuja.

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Early on Thursday morning Marebec and I set off for Jabi motor park, to meet up with Tracey, Karen and Dave for our trip to the Osun festival. By the time we got to Jabi Tracey had already sorted out a bus and ordered a breakfast of noodles and egg.

The journey from Abuja to Osogbo takes about eight hours and the bus was tightly packed, so it wasn’t the most comfortable of journeys. Marebec was completely absorbed in the latest Harry Potter book, though I did manage to distract her briefly:

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I’m not in Cameroon.

Nigerian immigration changed their procedure for NGOs applying for re-entry visas for their staff, without any notice. So something that used to take two days is now taking weeks, all applications have to be processed by the National Planning Commission before being passed to immigration.

The VSO programme office staff have been spending a lot of time going back and forth trying to speed things up, but without any success. On Friday we were told that the visas definitely wouldn’t be ready before Tuesday, so we had to cancel the trip to Cameroon.

This is a bit of a disappointment and I’m really quite annoyed with the local bureacracy.

On the bright side it meant that we could go to Bob’s party at the Irish embassy on Saturday. We’ve also decided to go to the Osun Festival in Oshogbo later this week.

My mobile phone is currently unwell (this is related to the party at the Irish embassy), so until I either fix it or replace it you wont be able to call me and I can’t read text messages.

I’m hoping to head off on a trip to Cameroon tomorrow. It may be delayed by recent changes to immigration procedures here which mean that requests for re-entry visas have to go through both immigration and the National Planning Commission. All this for a bit of paper to say that I’m allowed back into a country I’m legally allowed to be in!

Anyway, assuming all goes well I’ll be back in Abuja around the 12th of August.

Jo’s leaving today, so she wanted to make one last trip to Kabba and took Mary, Marebec and I along.

After an uneventful journey on Friday afternoon we arrived and received the usual warm welcome from Father Noel, then had a few drinks. The little plastic toy on Mary’s shoulder in the first picture is Nunzilla, she used to spit fire but since she was dropped on her head she’d not been the same.

Saturday started slowly as people gradually crawled out of bed and had breakfast, we then watched a couple of films and went for a walk up the nearby hill (which houses the local TV transmitter). The hill you can see in the picture is “juju hill”, a local religious site, outsiders are forbidden to climb it.

Bob, Ronan and Dave arrived on Saturday afternoon, so the drinking started again.