Two out of three ain't bad

Patience is something that I do not possess. Well, not in large quantities anyway. A few things have happened in the past week to test my patience. Some of them are not printable on my blog. But here are the ones that are…

For some unknown reason the electricity supply in My Squat has been amazing. By amazing, I mean really amazing. I’ve had electricity for at least 2 hours every day for the last week. I know you’re probably thinking how could this possibly be something I can complain about. But as people who know me will readily confirm, I can pretty much always find something to complain about. The electricity supply was so amazing on Saturday that in the space of 1 minute it managed to explode every lightbulb in My Squat (well, there are only 2 – I have never had a lightbulb in my kitchen), break my iPod and break the adapter to my laptop, which had only just been plugged in to charge so had no battery left. This was despite everything being plugged into a surge protector. I was less than impressed. The exploding of the lightbulbs didn’t seem like something that would be too difficult to fix, so I thought I’d tackle that one first. After walking 20 minutes up the hill to try and find lightbulbs, failing, and walking 20 minutes back down the hill, I decided to at least try and remove the remnants of the old lightbulbs from the light fittings. The ceiling in My Squat is quite high. To reach the lightbulb in my bedroom I had to balance a small table on my bed and stand on top of it. Needless to say, I fell off, bruised both my legs and swore quite a lot. Before I broke my neck climbing up to the one in my bathroom, I enlisted the help of my friend who is thankfully over 6 foot tall, and also brought me the new lightbulbs, so he managed to resolve that issue. As for my laptop, I am very proud of my ability to fix that. For some unknown reason it occurred to me to try swapping the fuse in the plug of my laptop adapter with the fuse in my hair straighteners as they were both 3A (yes, I really did bring hair straighteners to Nigeria with me. And yes, I can count the number of times I have used them on one hand). Given that I am the most clueless person in the world when it comes to electrical equipment, and I have never consciously thought about the fact that a plug even has a fuse in it, let alone considered how to remove the fuse, I have no idea why this occurred to me. But IT WORKED. So I was very happy. My iPod is still firmly out of action and I haven’t yet worked out how to fix that. But as good old Meat Loaf said, two out of three ain’t bad.

There’s a dog that lives on my compound. This dog is kept in a cage round the back of the building, which is where I’m meant to hang my washing to dry. But every time I go round there I want to cry because in 3 months I have never seen the dog let out of the cage. So I don’t go round there, and just leave my washing drying in my room (this also helps to contribute to the wet dog smell that I seem to carry around with me on a daily basis – another addition to the ‘how attractive can I possibly get’ list). I have tried sneaking up to the cage to feed the dog, but he (or at least until recently I thought it was a he) is so badly treated that whenever anyone goes near the cage ‘he’ starts barking and snarling and making so much noise that I have to run away again before someone sees me. I’ve tried telling the security guy on my compound (who I think owns the dog) that if he wants ‘him’ to be an effective guard dog then he needs to feed ‘him’ because otherwise ‘he’ is just going to get sick and die. But this has never worked either. If I didn’t think I’d get my arm bitten off then I’d sneak out and release ‘him’ because even roaming wild would be a better life than the one ‘he’s’ got at the moment. And recently ‘he’ has been making even more noise than normal, and this has been combined with howling from what I thought was another dog as well, but which I discovered on Monday was howling from 6 baby Alsatian puppies. So the ‘he’ turned out to be a ‘she’. How she was healthy enough to give birth is beyond me. The puppies are so cute. But they are also the noisiest things in the world. For some completely crazy reason they are being kept apart from their mum, and so they howl allllll day and alllllllllllll night. She also howls and barks allllllllll day and allllllllllll night because she is distressed that she can’t stop her babies from crying. The only way I can deal with the way animals are treated here is just to pretend it’s not happening. Pathetic I know, but there’s not much else I can do. I asked how much they were selling the puppies for. 40,000 Naira (£160). I had considered buying them all and keeping them and the mum in my room and feeding them all up but at that price I think I may need to reconsider that decision. Although it might be one way to ensure I could at least get one good night’s sleep.

My neighbour has a very posh car that he parks directly outside my bedroom window at night. I am very grateful he has a posh car, because on the odd occasions we leave for work at the same time (or rather, when I manage to stalk him and to run out of my room as soon as I hear him locking his door and then start walking out of the compound at a very slow pace with a very sad expression on my face in the hope he’ll feel sorry for me and offer me a lift) it means I get an air conditioned journey to work. But this week I have been less grateful that he has a very posh car. Because his very posh car has a very sensitive alarm system. The alarm goes off whenever I open or close my bedroom window. It also goes off when there is a lot of heavy rain. We are now in rainy season. 6 nights out of 7 we have very heavy rain. 6 nights out of 7 it is like sleeping in an ambulance bay because his car alarm is sounding and the lights are flashing directly outside my bedroom window. So sleep is something I have not had a great deal of recently.

Combine that with some ‘issues’ at work, and I’ve had a few grumpy moments in the past week.

I know this sounds like a very negative blog post. None of these things ever really get to me, apart from perhaps making me a bit grumpy for a few minutes and then something will happen to make me laugh and remind me why I love living here all over again. Like when I was standing on the main road trying to flag down a taxi in the pouring rain the other morning, and a guy came up to me with a wheelbarrow and an umbrella and told me he would provide me with my transport to work. I was about 7 miles away from my office and so I had to politely decline, but he made me smile all the same. Or like the taxi I got into that then broke down 2 minutes later and I was already very late to meet someone. So the taxi driver flagged down the first taxi he saw, which was going no where near the direction I needed to go in, and dashed the driver (tipped him) to take me first, and then go to where he was meant to be going, out of his own pocket.

And some other good things that happened this week. My friend taught me how to fry yam, which is now my favourite food (this isn’t saying much, given I normally eat the same thing, or variations of the same thing, every day). But still, it’s something I can cook for myself and can count as one of my five a day. Plus until I learnt how to cook it myself, the only place I could go to buy it was my favourite outside bar, and this meant that not only was I having fried yam, but beer as well. So at least now I can cook it for myself my liver can have a slight break. Someone from VSO came down to Calabar to do our first placement visit, and took us for dinner on Friday night and I had CHEESE. The first cheese I’ve eaten in as long as I can remember. One of the other British people I met a few weeks ago is leaving Calabar soon, and she has been amazing and given me loads of things she no longer needs. So My Squat has now had the Nigerian equivalent of Changing Rooms, and is the proud owner of a rug, two sets of stacking shelves, two little tables, some scales, and a massive black bin I can store water in. It’s sad how happy these things have made me. We got Monday off work as a Public Holiday, and so I had a lovely long weekend. And the best thing of all – getting a letter from my Grandma and Grandad, which cheered me up instantly xxx