Caboose

Today Marebec, Cocoy and I went out to visit some Filipino ex-pats living in Utako (an area of Abuja out to the west).

I hadn’t realised that going along would not only involve playing scrabble (and losing) but joining in with karaoke. This was a painful experience for everyone but they insisted that I sing, twice.

Here’s a picture of Marebec singing (she’s really good):

The good news is that I have internet access at work again, the bad news is that some spamming scumbags seem to be trying to use the contact form on this site to send junk mail.

I don’t think it’s working, it all seems to be ending up in my inbox instead, but I’ve disabled the contact form until I can be sure I’m not acting as an unwitting intermediary for these vermin.

Update: the contact form is back up again, the attempted spam was just being sent to me instead of the intended victims. I’ll have to think about ways of avoiding this as I don’t want hundreds of these messages clogging my inbox.

On Easter Sunday a few of us Abuja-based VSOs travelled up to Usuma Dam for a picnic. This is the main water supply for Abuja, but is actually quite a pleasant place to go.

Update: added the pictures…

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Just a quick message to let you all know that I’m still alive. Unfortunately events have conspired to make it difficult to stay in touch.

The British Council (with free internet access) suffered a power surge that blew up their server and, almost two weeks later, they still haven’t fixed it. Something has also gone wrong with the server that provides internet access at work, and it’s taking them weeks to fix it.

This means that for internet access I have to go out and find an internet cafe or use the hotel’s business centre (at an extortionate NGN30 per minute!).

To make matters worse sending text messages has become very unreliable over the past week or so, it seems to take about 24 hours for messages sent to the UK to be processed.

I’m hoping internet access at either the British Council or work will be working again soon…

House update: the repairs to the house are apparently now finished, it has new lights, fixed plumbing and a fresh coat of paint. We’re now just waiting for some appliances (fridge, I think) and final approval from admin.

Occasionally in among the normal traffic of Abuja you’ll see cattle being herded along the streets.

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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One of the many things I’m adapting to in my first few weeks here in Nigeria is the use of Pidgin English. At first it just looks and sounds like accented standard English with sloppy grammar but there are quite a few words adopted from local languages and unique to Pidgin.

Today I’ve had a quick look for links to more information about it:

• Dictionary of Nigerian Pidgin words and phrases
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights translated into Pidgin

It seems that Nigerian Pidgin is officially a creole rather than a pidgin, because people grow up speaking it natively.

We moved into a new office yesterday, so here’s a picture of it:

And here’s a picture of Radio House:

On the last day of in-country training I took a picture of the group with some of the VSO programme staff and employers, I’ve only just got round to downloading it from my camera:

After our return from placement visits we had another couple of days of in-country training before travelling to our placements yesterday.

Some of the volunteers had fairly long journeys ahead of them, although Mary, Peter and Geraint were relieved to hear that they would be flying. In my case a Radio Nigeria car picked me up from the hotel at 8:30am and I was being greeted by the Director of News at Radio House shortly afterwards.

My house isn’t ready yet, due to delays in getting the budget approved, so I’ll be staying at the Rockview Hotel until it is. This is across the other side of Abuja, very close to the VSO Programme Office and the British Council. According to rumours it even has a swimming pool.

Everybody at the radio station seems very friendly, I’m suffering from the usual overload of introductions, so I can’t remember most of the people’s names.