A vegetarian's worst nightmare?

The picture doesn’t really do it justice. You need to experience the smell at the same time in order to get the full effect.

I’ve had some pretty grim experiences with food since getting here. Having to eat the bean cake which turned out to be full of fish. Sharing my noodles with Ratty. Biting into roasted corn and a maggot falling out of it (I had already eaten 90% of the corn by that time so I told myself that was definitely the ONLY maggot that would have been in there. There was absolutely NO chance there were others and I’d just ingested them). They were nothing compared to Saturday night’s adventures. We went to a friend’s restaurant/bar, which is very well known locally for its signature dish. In fact it boasts that it serves the best version of this dish in town. And what is this delicious meal? Goat Head. Yes, that’s right, the Head of a Goat. The ENTIRE head of a goat. One of the people we were out with expressed an interest (or perhaps more a morbid curiosity) in what this dish was like. I learnt very early on not to show any interest in food here unless you are very very sure that you want to eat it. And not just eat it, but have your facial expression scrutinised by everyone you are with whilst you eat whatever delicacy you have been given, just to make sure you really are enjoying it and you’re not just pretending. And sure enough, no more than ten minutes after he uttered the words “I wonder what it tastes like” two big pots of steaming Goat Head had been placed on the table in front of us. Now, I knew being a vegetarian here would cause some challenges. The concept is just not understood. I can’t count how many times I’ve said I can’t eat something and the response has been, “I know you’re vegetarian, but it’s okay, this is just chicken.” I don’t usually ever have a problem with other people eating meat. I am also realistic and have to accept that quite often (here and at home) I am probably eating things that have been cooked next to, or come into contact with meat and fish. And I’d never be fussy enough to refuse to eat anything on that basis (I’d probably starve here if I started being that obsessive about it!) But the two pots of Goat Head really did push my vegetarianism to the extreme. It was like being in a horror movie. When my friend started chewing the meat off a lump of something and I realised when he put down the remains that it was the goats teeth, dirt, decay and all, I really did have to take a few deep breaths. The highlight was at the end of the evening when they were closing the restaurant and pushed a wheelbarrow of rejected Goat Head Bones past our table. I kept being told by one of our local friends that I was ‘missing out’. I’m not certain I agree with him. As appealing as chewing on a goats jawbone and eyeballs might seem, I might just push on through and stick to being a vegetarian.

Some other new ‘experiences’ this week.

1. Goosebumps. Yes, that’s right. I was cold. In Nigeria. I had to sleep with my jumper on.
2. Losing my temper. This doesn’t happen often. I’m frequently grumpy and I moan all the time, but actually losing my temper? Very rare. I had no water for most of last week. And when I say ‘no water’ I literally mean nothing. For the first part of the week it was fine because I just used the stored water I keep in my room (and tried to ignore the smell of stagnant pond). But by the time that ran out on Thursday I was feeling pretty fed up. The closest tap to collect water from is a 20 minute walk up my hill. I’m reasonably strong, but even I can’t carry my filled jerry can that far. On Friday morning I’d had enough and I asked my neighbour whether he could help me fetch water in his car, or if he knew when they’d be using the generator to pump us water (which is what usually happens when the water is off for a long-time). He just looked really confused and said he’d had water all week. I asked a couple more of my neighbours and they all said the same thing. Then my neighbour took me to the outside area behind my room and showed me the tap which controls my water supply. Which had been turned off. The security guard saw me and shouted to ask if there was a problem. He’d been bugging me all week for money for another fictitious electricity bill. The last time he did that and I refused to pay he turned the electricity supply off to my room. I have little doubt that he was responsible for turning the water off to my room. The tap is directly outside my bathroom window. It is impossible that it was turned off by mistake. Its only function is to control the water supply to my room. He then had the nerve to ask me for money again. He still owes me 2,000 Naira for the kitchen sink he never fixed. Something tells me that the two of us will never see eye to eye. At least I now know how to turn my water on myself.
3. The taxi I was in on the way to work being wheel clamped. In the middle of the road. There’s an area where taxi drivers aren’t allowed to stop and pick up passengers unless they dash (pay/bribe) the random men who stand on the side of the road. I’m not really sure what purpose these men serve. All they seem to do is to direct you to which cab to get into, which the taxi drivers are more than able to do themselves. Anyway, the driver of the taxi I was in didn’t want to dash anyone so seemed to think that if he just crawled along the road very slowly and made passengers jump into a moving car then he wouldn’t have to pay because technically he never stopped. Not so. The random men on the side of the road reached into the car, turned off the ignition, and pulled out the car keys. The taxi driver then started fighting with them (not very intelligent given there was one of him and about 10 of them). And then the traffic police (or just some more random men, I’m not really sure) came and clamped the car. Right in the middle of the road. In rush hour traffic. The door handle on the inside of the passenger door where I was sitting was broken and so I couldn’t actually get out. It took them a few minutes to realise I was still stuck inside, and to open the door so I could get another cab to work. This time I made sure I got in one that had paid the taxi attendants and so was actually allowed to stop to pick me up.

So all in all, another quiet few days in Calabar!

Green sludge and a bruised ego

As I’ve already mentioned, walking around here isn’t the most relaxing pastime. If you’re not being greeted or shouted at by everyone that you walk past, you’re being offered lifts by passing cars, or constantly being asked why you’re trekking again. If I’m having a tired day it’s almost a relief when it’s raining and I can use my umbrella to cover my face and have a relatively peaceful walk up my road. Not so the other day. I was walking back down the hill after work, and it had been raining pretty much all day. The sides of the roads were flooded, and so I was sticking to the pavements. Only the pavements were covered in green sludge. Green sludge that was every bit as slippery and as slimy as it looked. And I fell. Hard. Flat on my a*s and my back. My immediate thought was that I’d probably broken my laptop, which was in my rucksack, but thankfully I hadn’t. I was on the busiest part of my road, and within seconds I was surrounded by people saying sorry that I had fallen and trying to help me up and wipe all of the green sludge off me. They were shouting down the road to other people,’ “The Bakara has fallen, the Bakara has fallen.” It took about 5 minutes for me to convince them I was fine. Then I had to walk the rest of the way home covered in green sludge all down my back, with blood coming out of my elbow, leg and foot, and with a very bruised ego. It’s a measure of my lowered standards that when I was telling Jenny what had happened I said, “Oh well, at least it was only green sludge that I got covered in.” We had to laugh about the fact that I found that comforting. But I really did, considering all of the other things I frequently walk past/through on the roads that it could have been. So no more walking down the green sludgy pavements on rainy days in flipflops.

Some cultural learnings this week:

1. What do you do when you have a baby with a very blocked nose and you can’t get them to blow their nose? (WARNING: DO NOT KEEP READING THIS IF YOU ARE EATING) You suck the gunk out and then spit it out. I almost feel bad for putting this on my blog because it is so disgusting, but I couldn’t resist sharing this horrific piece of information. Witnessing this was not a highlight of my week.
2. When someone strokes your arm and says “Your skin is so soft, do you put sperm in your moisturiser?” the correct response is not to laugh. This is a very serious question. I then listened to a 10-minute explanation on the benefits of adding sperm to your moisturiser.
3. Rainy season here is not a good time to be unmarried. You get bombarded with constant questions regarding how you can possibly sleep at night in this cold weather without a “natural blanket”. A “natural blanket” being a man.
4. Working for an organisation that is supposed to promote women’s empowerment and hearing a stream of comments about the inferiority of women and then being told, “Gender equality? This is Africa. The man is still the man, and the woman is still the woman. You won't find gender equality here" by one of the managers in the organisation doesn’t do wonders for your enthusiasm as a volunteer.
5. Sitting and watching an attachment upload to an email for four hours is not the most calming of hobbies. Especially when it’s 9pm on a Thursday evening and you’ve been working on the same thing since 7am that morning. I very nearly threw my modem under a passing car.
6. When someone asks if you are married say yes, irrespective of who they are. Otherwise you get dragged down the road to be introduced to a crazy lady’s brother, who must have been about 70 years old. She ran up to him dragging me behind her shouting “Brother, I’ve found you a wife, I’ve found you a wife”. I made a hasty exit. The poor man looked very confused. This was the same lady who had spent the entire tricycle ride up my hill telling me I was lucky she was letting me sit next to her because in my country (being the UK) that would never happen as (and I quote): ‘your people would never be sat next to my people’.
7. Doing something as simple as standing on the side of the road minding your own business can cause a full-blown row between two men. I was just stood hailing down a taxi when a man stood on the pavement behind me told me that he didn’t want me to get a public taxi because ‘he loved me’ and wanted to ‘buy me a drop’ (a drop is a private taxi where you are the only passenger, and so it is about 8 times the cost of a public taxi which you share with however many other people). He then started shouting at every taxi that passed that he wanted a drop. A taxi full of people stopped, and the driver chucked all the passengers out so that he could take me in a drop. I explained to the taxi driver that I didn’t know the man, I didn’t want him paying for my taxi, and I just wanted a 50 Naira shared public taxi journey. The annoying man on the side of the road wouldn’t stop arguing with me about this, and by that time the poor taxi driver’s passengers had all gone and got in other taxis, so he’d lost all his fares from that journey. He was therefore pretty fed up with the annoying man on the side of the road, and quite rightly so. I wasn’t getting anywhere, as every time I tried to flag down a new taxi the annoying man on the side of the road interrupted me to tell the driver I wanted a drop, so I gave up and walked further up the road away from him so I could get a taxi in peace. Him and the taxi driver were still having a full-blown row by the time I last looked back.

And some good things this week:

1. Finding a place that sells REALLY good ice cream. It’s expensive, but definitely worth it.
2. A lovely lady who has a shop on my road refusing to let me pay my taxi fare and paying for me herself.
3. A new volunteer arriving in Calabar – someone else to drink beer with.
4. Packet macaroni cheese that I brought back from home. It was worth paying excess luggage for.
5. Finding a relatively decent bottle of red wine. Although I had to have a very long discussion with the lady in the shop about why I didn’t want a chilled bottle. Yes, that’s right, they all put red wine in the fridges here. The colder the better is the general motto.
6. Cooking fajitas for Jenny’s birthday. Despite me being the one who cooked them, they were actually edible. Especially when combined with fried yam. I’m starting to come to the conclusion that there’s nothing fried yam doesn’t go with.
7. Finding my way around a whole new part of Calabar all by myself. This doesn’t sound like much of an achievement, but for anyone who knows me well enough to know how bad my sense of direction is, and how much I hate doing things on my own, this was a pretty big breakthrough for me. I might just be becoming an adult.

So there goes another week. We’re praying for sunshine on Saturday so we can go and collapse by the swimming pool for the day. But if the past few days weather have been anything to go by, I shouldn’t get my hopes up!

I really need to learn to Man Up

I have just returned to Calabar after a lovely two weeks at home. I have the worlds best parents, who bought me a ticket to go home for my birthday so that I could indulge in hot showers and electricity and wine. And it was the best birthday present in the world. Nothing beats Jersey in the summer, and it was great to be able to catch up with so many people, although as predicted the time flew by and I didn’t get to see nearly as many people as I had hoped. And the down side? Me learning that no matter how settled I might think I feel in Calabar, I will never be happy about going back or saying goodbye to everyone at home. Given how much of a total mess I was back in February when I first left, I had really hoped that I might manage to be a bit more controlled this time round at the airport. But no such luck. There was nothing dignified or reserved about my departure. So much for the British not showing emotions. I once again shuffled through security snuffling and snorting, with tears pouring down my face. On the plus side, my lack of dignity and inability to control my emotions works wonders in terms of the way I am treated by airport staff – the man that needed to go through my bag couldn’t have been more apologetic as he asked me to unpack the 20 packets of ‘pasta in a mug’ and packet macaroni cheese, 6 copies of trashy magazines, and 5 packets of Boots cucumber face wipes. However I think I was slightly less hysterical than I was in February, as the people at security didn’t offer me a glass of water and a seat before asking me to go through the scanner this time, so maybe there was a small improvement. Either way, someone really needs to teach me to Man the Hell Up.

I took full advantage of my luggage allowance, and came back with my bags full of every type of dried food on offer in Waitrose. Including couscous, dried mushrooms, a bottle of Pimms, Pringles, chocolate and magazines. As well as the entire contents of Boots, and Warehouse’s summer collection. It might be a bit late to be mentioning this now, but if anyone bought shares in Warehouse or Accessorise during the last two weeks, they will be smiling.

Whilst I was at home I also attempted to have something done with The Hair. My hairdresser took one look at it and had to walk away for a few minutes. But after cutting it all off, it seems to be falling out a little bit less. In a bid to avoid me going in with a comb over the next time I see her, she also gave me what seemed like an entire year’s supply of free samples. So I’m sorted for intensive conditioning treatments for the rest of my placement.

On the not so good side, after feeling pretty healthy for the past four months, I got home and got some nasty bug. So spent the last few days at home feeling very sorry for myself because I couldn’t do any of the things I wanted to do. My mood didn’t improve during my journey back to Calabar, which went something like this: Jersey – Gatwick – Heathrow – Abuja - Lagos (yes, that’s right, Lagos) – Abuja – Uyo – Calabar – MY SQUAT. I left home at 12pm on Saturday and arrived at My Squat at 8pm on Sunday. I was already feeling quite tired by 4.20am on Sunday when we went to land at Abuja (I’ve never been good at sleeping at planes), and so I was slightly confused when after starting to descend, the plane began to go back up again. And up. And up. And then the Captain announced that unfortunately we couldn’t land at Abuja. Well, not yet anyway. The landing lights on the runway weren’t working. But not to worry, he assured us; the plane had enough fuel for another three hours. Excellent. So for the next hour we circled Abuja. Over and over and over again. Until finally it was accepted that the men working on the lights would not be able to fix them, and we didn’t have enough fuel left to keep circling until daylight. And so off we went to Lagos instead. We sat at Lagos for an hour or so, refuelled the plane, and finally landed in Abuja at 9am. This didn’t actually bother me too much as it helped to take some time away from the 11 hour wait I knew I had at Abuja airport before my flight to Uyo. It also didn’t seem to bother anyone else on the plane. We were sat there for over 4 and a half hours longer than we were expecting, and yet no one seemed to complain. People just sat there quietly and waited until we heard the next update. I’ve been on planes that have attempted to land in Jersey, failed for some reason (usually fog) and everyone has complained endlessly. Not so here.

I did discover one slight downside with long waits at Nigerian airports. They are not designed for people travelling on their own with a lot of luggage. Just trying to get a trolley was a mission in itself, and then I discovered that the trolleys don’t fit through the door to the bathrooms. The airport was really busy, I couldn’t risk leaving all my luggage out in the corridor. And I couldn’t check my luggage in until 2 hours before my flight. But after having just sat on the flight from Heathrow for 11 hours I was desperate for a change of clothes, a wash, and to brush my teeth. So I had to improvise. I found a deserted corridor and crouched down behind my trolley to change my top, and then brushed my teeth over a plant pot. I hope they don’t have security cameras. I was also very very thirsty, but the only place I could buy water was upstairs in the airport. And guess what, there wasn’t a lift. Well actually, there was a lift. But it had a sign on it saying it only went to the 3rd floor offices, it didn’t go to the 1st floor where there was the cafeteria and the bar. Of course not, because people waiting at an international airport aren’t likely to have a lot of luggage. It would make no sense at all to have a lift going to the cafe. So by the time I could check my luggage in at 1.40pm I was just about ready to abandon my luggage and go and buy a drink anyway. Although I’d gone from wanting water to wanting a neat vodka. My journey back to Calabar continued to not go quite as planned, as in the taxi on the drive from Uyo (it’s at least a 2 hour journey to Calabar) our taxi ran out of petrol. In the torrential rain. By that stage I was starting to feel like someone was really trying to see how long I could stay awake without passing out.

When the plane couldn’t land in Abuja, the lady sat next to me turned to me and asked if it was my first time in Nigeria. I explained that it wasn’t, and she said thank goodness, because she didn’t want me to get a bad impression from the very start. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that nothing about what had just happened had surprised me in the slightest. When she asked how I was liking Nigeria, and I said I was really happy, and liked living in Calabar, all she could say was, “Why?” She couldn’t have looked more surprised. She said that whenever she hears anyone say anything positive about her country she wonders whether they’re living in the same place as she is. Like many people I have spoken to here, she is fed up. Fed up with the fact that Nigeria has resources. And Nigeria has money. A lot of it. And yet these resources and this money are not getting to the people who need it. She was fed up with the leadership. And she was fed up with the fact that in some ways the country has gone backwards in recent years rather than forwards. So when she asked why I liked living here, I didn’t know what to say. Because I know that part of the reason I’m happy here is because I know that it’s just for now. If this was where I knew I would be living for the next 20 years, my response might have been very different. Unlike most people here, I have the luxury of knowing I can go home for two weeks to escape the craziness, to soak up the easiness of life there, to enjoy the hot showers, the running water, and the constant electricity. So why do I like living here? Probably because it’s a novelty. ‘An experience’. But for most people here it’s neither of those things. It’s every day life, and it’s frustrating.

Unfortunately this has turned into another negative blog post. But no matter what the reason is, it is nice to be back. My Squat was exactly as I had left it, and hadn’t been taken over by Ratty as I had feared. In fact the only signs of life were a half dead cockroach and a big fat slimy millipede. I also had my reunion with Harp and fried yam last night. And Jenny got me the best birthday present anyone living here could ask for, a “Stop Nigeria I want to get out of here” voucher, entitling me to a day’s swimming at the lovely hotel up the road, including dinner there. They serve pizza. And cold beer. And have a huge flat screen TV in the outside bar area. So as soon as we find a Saturday when it isn’t raining, I plan on taking up residence on the sun lounger at 8am and not moving until someone actually has to ask me to leave.