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!
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