Don’t worry; this isn’t another entire blog post on Squirt. Just one more picture.
Things have been much the same here. I can’t believe I’ve been in Nigeria for over 8 months, I really don’t know where the time is going. Some good things that have happened recently:
• Squirt. Okay, so I might just make one (or two!) more tiny mentions of him. He is officially a ‘he’ – well, according to several of the vets at the vet surgery I took him too. This did however seem to require slightly more discussion than I am used to at home, which did give me a few concerns about the standard of vet care available here. But, against the odds he is still going, and has become a proper part of our household. My sleep deprivation has reached whole new levels. For the first week he needed feeding every couple of hours, and now he has learnt how to climb onto my bed and just likes to wake me up at any given opportunity. But despite that and the fact that a tin of cat food costs half my daily allowance, he’s staying. He might just be the cutest thing in the world.
• A night out, Abuja style. Awesome night, lots of beer, and lots of dancing.
• Sunshine: Abuja is getting hotter. I think I should have been born a reptile. People keep expecting me to melt. The man selling vegetables at the end of our road looked like he thought I was categorically insane when I said I didn’t need to stand under his shelter whilst I waited for him to bag up everything I’d asked for (I buy a LOT of vegetables each week). And the gateman on our compound almost had heart failure when I came back from a run the other day. Granted I was very sweaty and red, but he looked as though he thought I was about to die. He only speaks Hausa and very limited English, so after jumping up from his seat and madly waving his hands around for a while he physically pushed me down onto his bench and wouldn’t let me get up for about 5 minutes. So whilst everyone else is saying the sun is too hot, I’m happy. Especially when I’ve got the British Village pool to lie by. Plus part of it is me telling myself it’s not hot – if I start to think it’s hot now, I’ll be a pool of mush when it really gets hot in a few months.
• Getting offered 50,000 Naira for my hair. Not the first time this has happened, but unlike the last time, this wasn’t by a drunk woman in a bar. This was by someone in my office. She seemed pretty serious, and has now mentioned it several times. That would pay for 5 return trips to Calabar by bus. Unfortunately a fairly important person in my life warned me that I’d be spending a lot of time on my own until my hair grew back if I did it, so I had to sadly thank her for her generous offer, but say no thank you.
• Buying some Nigerian fabric – someone in my office is going to take me to have some dresses made (it’s only taken me 8 months!!). I’m very excited.
And some not so good things:
• Watching an episode of House where a man had a cockroach in his ear. My paranoia where those little beasts are concerned didn’t need any help being blow even further out of proportion. At least now I know that my earplugs hopefully have two purposes at night.
• The morning that followed the night out. I’m getting too old for this. I was not a pretty site for the whole of Saturday.
• Dying my hair. I stupidly chose to do this at the weekend when our water is off. It took me two days to get the remnants of dye off my forehead. It seems a bucket bath really is no substitute for the real thing. You’d think I’d have learnt after the first time when I had to walk 30 minutes up my hill in Calabar in the scorching heat to fetch water with hair dye on my hair (and all over my face) because it hadn’t occurred to me to check my water was on before dying it. It also doesn’t seem to matter how many times I try and do it myself, I never avoid getting the two-tone look. Very glad my hair is up 90% of the time.
• Packet macaroni cheese. I never thought that would be classed as a bad thing, but I poured it in the pan only to see lots of little creatures come floating to the top. They must have got inside the box. Did I do the right thing and throw it out? No. This was the Saturday with the baaaaaad hangover. I needed that macaroni cheese. I used a spoon to remove the bugs from the water. Am I ever going to be able to re-integrate into society when I get home?
• Our office. A lot of people in a very small very hot very noisy space. Trying to concentrate has become a daily challenge. I’m considering sitting in the corridor, I think it would be more peaceful.
• Waking up at 3am to what sounded like endless squeaking from a dog toy coming from outside. It was beyond loud, and in my sleep dazed state, I really couldn’t figure out what it could be. After sitting in bed for about 10 minutes trying to work it out, I got up and looked out the window (why it didn’t occur to me to do this sooner, I don’t know). But I immediately wished I hadn’t, when a swarm of giant bats flew RIGHT past my nose. It took all my self-control not to scream. Or at least I think it was bats, it was very dark. It was either bats or big flying dogs or goats.
And one last mention of Squirt to finish. When I was asking my housemates if they minded if I adopted him, I tried to sell him to them by saying that he could help catch any bugs and ward off any rats/mice. I’m thinking I may have slightly oversold his potential usefulness. There was a massive cockroach in our lounge the other morning, and I didn’t have any raid to hand so went to crush it with my flipflop. He followed to see what I was doing, and then as soon as he got near enough to see what it was all his fur went up on end and he hid behind my legs. When I moved he then ran into my room and hid under my bed where he wouldn’t come out until I coaxed him out with milk. I’m thinking he might not be much of a rat catcher if cockroaches send him cowering under my bed.
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