Strikes, dead monkeys and malaria (again)

So it’s been a fun filled two weeks. After 6 days of strikes, life slowly started to return to normal (or as normal as things ever are here). As things go, the strikes weren’t that much fun. There’s something slightly unsettling about having everything come to a complete standstill. There was no public transport, nothing was open (apart from the small shop at the bottom of our road, thankfully) and all the cash machines ran out of money (not that anything was open for people to spend their money on). However I was reliably informed that whilst most of the country seemed to grind to a halt, beer was delivered to our local bar each day. At least they have their priorities straight. One good thing about the strike is that it meant a lot more volunteers than normal were in Abuja, so it was good to have the opportunity to see people I don’t normally get to see. We did manage to do some fun things during the strike:

• Went swimming and for brunch at a posh compound down the road from us (I think the person that invited us felt sorry for us and could tell we hadn’t had running water for a very long time, so would benefit from being submerged in a swimming pool).
• Went on a ‘pub crawl’ in the area around where we live.
• Making fajitas (with real cheese and everything).
• Being lazy at the British Village (although they chose the week of the strike to shut their showers – the week when we had absolutely no running water).

And an update on the monkey that tried to eat us: the morning after that incident, we heard a hideous animal noise coming from outside (poor Squirt wasn’t taking any chances and went to hide deep inside my wardrobe as she could tell something wasn’t going well for the animal concerned). We looked outside, only to see a group of men with big sticks standing around beating the monkey. They then dragged the (slightly stiller) monkey outside our compound, and I’m not sure what happened to it next. But when we asked the Security guy later what had happened to the monkey, I distinctly heard the words “chop, later, chop”. When I asked again, he said, “Monkey set to run free. Smaller baby monkey coming tomorrow. This will be friendly monkey.” I somehow doubt that being bludgeoned with sticks by a group of men was a precursor to the evil monkey being “set free”. I’m yet to see the new monkey. I think I’ll avoid it for as long as possible, happy things don’t seem to happen around these monkeys.

And then after the strike, just as I was thinking how nice it was to be back at work, I got malaria. Again. So all in all, not a great start to 2012.