Caboose

On Friday I set off with Phyllis, a serving VSO volunteer from Kenya, to visit her placement in Sokoto, in the far northwest of Nigeria.

The idea of the placement visit is that new volunteers can pick up some useful advice, get practice at some of the things they’ll need to do in their own placement and see a different part of the country.

This is Phyllis sitting in her living room, the candle is still lit because the power has only just come back on.

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It’s been a interesting few days, lots of new things to take in but Abuja is already starting to feel less strange.

I’m currently on In-Country Training. Yesterday we have filled in lots of forms, visited the VSO programme office, visited the British High Commission here to register and become members of the local British Council library. The picture below is of the street outside the British High Commission, the poor visibility is due to this being Harmattan season, caused by dust being blown from the deserts to the north.

Today we went on a trip to Nyanya market, to give us some practice in haggling, social chit-chat (which is very important here) and speaking Pidgin.

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This is just a quick message as I’ve got to head off to lunch.

We arrived in Abuja yesterday morning, got through immigration and customs without any trouble and were met by local VSO staff. We’re staying at the Crystal Palace hotel in Abuja, huge meals and air conditioning, luxury!

Internet access is trickier, I’m currently using the internet cafe at the hotel, but I should be able to get access from my room in the evening.

We didn’t do much yesterday, exchanged some money, bought local mobile phone pay-as-you go cards and went to a party at the Irish embassy.

More later, possibly with some pictures…

After a late lunch with Mum and Dad at Edinburgh I said goodbye and got the 1610 shuttle to London Heathrow.

I’m now stuck in Terminal 4, my flight to Abuja doesn’t leave until after nine. I’m very, very bored. I’ve wandered round the shops, I’ve had a coffee.

There aren’t enough seats, it’s too hot and the keyboard on this BT internet terminal is atrocious (but at least it’s cheaper than using the WiFi hotspot).

Time for some more wandering and maybe a pint…

I’ve spent a while this evening packing up some of my stuff, ready to set off for Nigeria tomorrow. Today has been quite relaxing, a trip to Perth with Mum, Dad, Clare and my little niece Eve (picture below). We had a fantastic lunch at Kerracher’s, a fish restaurant above a fishmongers, the scallops were especially lovely.

Eve in her pushchair, not happy that I’m distracting her from watching traffic

I was also very impressed by IBM’s technical support today. I phoned them yesterday to report that my laptop’s hard disk was sounding unwell and a replacement arrived around lunchtime!

I’ve been making some dramatic changes to the software that runs this part of the site.

Things look a bit different as the page templates have changed, but old links should still work (several hoops had to be jumped through to make that happen).

For the technically-minded the change was from Movable Type to WordPress.

Let me know (using the ‘Contact me’ link below) if you manage to break something.

I’ve created a mailing list for people who want to receive email updates on what I’m up to in Nigeria.

Most of the same stuff will be appearing on this site, but email is sometimes less hassle than having to remember to check a website.

To subscribe, send an email to:

  kevinnigeria-subscribe at caboose.org.uk

The mailing list software will reply with more instructions (although it seems to take a while).

Now that I’m back living at my parents’ house in Stirling I can concentrate on the various things I need to sort out before leaving for Nigeria.

In fact, one of the things was filling in the Nigerian visa forms. My departure date is now the 11th of February, leaving Edinburgh at 1630 and getting in to Abuja at 0525.

It’s all seeming a bit more imminent now that I’ve quit my job and I’m concentrating on preparing for Nigeria.

After months of neglect I’ve been tweaking a few things on the site, mostly not visible but it’s all part of the plan to let me update this from Nigeria.

The Contact me links at the end of each post now include some information about the page they’re on, so I can work out what people are on about when I get a message.

I spent the past week on a VSO training course at Harborne Hall in Birmingham.

Back in the summer I attended the Preparing for Change and Volunteers and Development courses. This time it was Skills for Working in Development (or SKWID), 4 days of learning about and practising facilitiation skills, conflict management and similar things.

Like the previous courses, it was quite good fun, although pretty tiring. Most days ran from 9am to about 8pm with lots of activities which left no opportunities for snoozing at the back of the room. What really makes these courses are the other people on them, another really good bunch on SKWID, mostly heading out to Malawi.