REAL cocktails, shopping and abandonment

I went to a really fun place the other day – a friend from work took me to Designer Marketplace, which is held the first Saturday of every month and is full of local designers selling their work. There was also music, endless amounts of yummy food and PROPER COCKTAILS. I spent far too much money, and drunk a cocktail that was far too strong for 2pm on a Saturday, but it was really good fun. The downside was the blow to my self-confidence – I have never seen so many incredibly beautiful people in one place. Every person there was the height of fashion with immaculate hair, nails, and makeup. And there I was in clothes that I’ve now been wearing over and over again for 15 months and with hair that is in dire need of being coloured and cut. Someone came round to take photos and took one of us. She showed it to us to check we were happy with it before she uploaded it to the internet, and I said no because I looked pretty hideous, and her response? “Don’t worry, when I upload it I’ll try and make you look less… white.” Oh good, thanks!! Then we went to a tailor and I’m having 3 dresses made, so we shall see if these turn out any better than my last attempt, which have been confined to home because they consist of two rather bright and garish dresses, one of which contains a truly hideous 80s Madonna style pointy chest area.

On Sunday I experienced how the other half live here, as I went for breakfast at the house of some lovely people who I met on a plane journey home back in November. They’re ex volunteers, and so now want to help out current volunteers, and they’re so kind. So I had a yummy breakfast and a swim and got to meet some other lovely people who are also previous volunteers. I wonder what percentage of international development workers are ex VSO. From the people I’ve met here, it must be pretty high.

And now begins the mass exodus of volunteers. My housemate left this morning, another volunteer is staying in the flat until Friday when she leaves, and from June onwards there’s a steady stream of departures (including my own!). But there are also some new arrivals on their way, so I’m looking forward to that as they’re hopefully due to get here before I leave. It’s going to be a busy couple of months getting everything finished and preparing to come home.

Water water everywhere

And some other ramblings…

I mentioned in a recent blog post that our water supply has been pretty crap - our taps have been more for display purposes than anything else. So when I woke up the other night and heard water I was more than a little confused. It was coming from the kitchen, so I walked in there in the dark, stepped down into our kitchen (thankfully our kitchen and the bathrooms are all a step lower than the rest of the flat, presumably for this very reason) and was submerged in water. We must have left the kitchen tap on, and the water had come back on for the first time in God knows how long. And it had flooded our kitchen. Not just a small flood, a big big flood. Our kitchen was under about 4 inches of water. Uh oh. So after trying unsuccessfully to remove some of the water I realised this wasn’t a task I could easily undertake on my own, and woke my housemate up. We then spent two hours bailing water out using various cups, bowls and mops. Not my most fun activity at 2am when I’ve got a busy day at work the next day. Although Squirt seemed to have a wonderful time. Thankfully our downstairs neighbour hasn’t yet come knocking to say he’s got a new water feature in his kitchen. I was telling my friend about it the next day and he pointed out that perhaps next time (I’m kind of hoping there won’t be a next time!) I would want to be a little more careful in terms of potential electric shocks, given the fridge was also submerged in water. This hadn’t even occurred to me. Then the next night I went to turn off my bathroom light, and got the most painful electric shock I think I’ve ever had. My finger was almost stuck to the socket, and my arm went numb. The next morning my finger felt char grilled. So all in all I think I’m going to be a little more careful with electrical supplies in future.

The animal saga continues. Someone has “got rid” of the four kittens that were living downstairs. One day one of the downstairs neighbours was moaning that they were a “nuisance” and the next day they had disappeared. The security guard said a car came and “got rid of them”. Whatever they did with them (I prefer to not think about it) they spared the mother, who now doesn’t know what to do with herself and spends all her time sitting outside our front door howling because she can’t find her kittens. The approach to animals here is something I’ll never get used to. The kittens weren’t doing any harm, they meowed occasionally, and used to run up to see you when you came through the gate to our compound, but other than that they were completely harmless. And most people in the compound seemed to really like having them around, and would always put bread and rice and water down for them. Why they couldn’t have just left them be is beyond me. But one thing is for sure; Squirt is NEVER going outside here.

And now for non-animal related updates. I got invited to a “cocktail party” at the Sheraton Hotel the other night. I was so excited; I had images of pina coladas, margaritas, mojitos, and cosmopolitans. Silly me. The “cocktails” were wine glasses filled with soft drinks. Fanta, sprite, coke, orange juice. There were however mini chocolate cakes, so I ate about 10 of them to make up for my disappointment. And then I got bought beer instead, so it wasn’t a total loss.

I treated myself with a trip to the cinema on Saturday. We initially wanted to go and see the Hunger Games, so looked it up online and it said it was showing at 3pm. So off we went to the cinema in time for 3pm. Only to try and buy our tickets and be told the film isn’t showing yet, they haven’t received it from Lagos. Not only are they advertising it as showing on their website, the viewing times were also being advertised on the screen in front of us in the cinema when we went to buy our tickets. Never mind, we got to see another good film instead, and a coffee shop has opened up in the cinema that sells iced coffees – pricey but AWESOME! Then we went shopping at the Craft Village afterwards, so all in all a very fun Saturday.

Something not so fun are the run-ins I have been having with insects recently. My bed is being eaten alive by termites. I can hear them gnawing away even over the sound of my ceiling fan. It’s a little off putting when you’re trying to go to sleep. Then the other night the electricity was off, so I was sat eating a mango by candlelight. And then the electricity came back on. Oh how I wished it hadn’t. It turned out the mango I had been eating was crawling with maggots. I don’t think it’s possible to explain how disgusted I was by this. I brushed my teeth about ten times, and had a cup of scolding hot tea in the hope they’d shrivel up and die immediately. I will never again eat fruit in darkness , and it’ll be quite some time before I feel able to eat a mango again.

Easter fun

My second Easter in Nigeria. This year the long weekend was spent having lots of fun in Abuja. Jenny came to stay, and some highlights included:

• Going to the craft village. I need to start filtering down the number of things I want to buy from there to take home, as at the moment it’s pretty much everything they sell, including a big jewelled trunk thing and a chair and table. Given I’m already transporting a cat back with me I’m thinking all of those things may not fit in my luggage allowance.
• Having a drink at the Sheraton. Okay, it was only a fanta, and it was 5 times the price we normally pay for a fanta, but it’s nice to see how the other half live every now and again.
• Going for fish (or egg and chips for me) at Abacha Barracks and buying more mangos the size of my head.
• Having beer at our local bar.
• Sangria out of a carton. It’s actually pretty good.
• Spending two days lying by the pool at the British Village, and drinking gin and tonic (we could only afford one each, but still).
• A night in ordering pizza (yes, this service does exist in Abuja) and watching a DVD.
• Making yam balls (they’re nicer than they sound, really).

I even got to eat my body weight in chocolate as Jenny helped to deliver a super exciting parcel from my very own Easter Bunny in Calabar.

As always it was awesome to see Jenny, but it made me sad to think this was probably one of our last weekends together before the end of our VSO time here. July is definitely approaching far too quickly for my liking. But all in all, a very fun Easter!

No water, running in the desert and getting PUBLISHED!

Another blog post full of a whole lot of waffle…

I’ll start with the really exciting news first (well, I was excited anyway!) – our journal article got accepted for publication, so all the hard work and submitting about 600 different versions was worth it. I’m not quite sure this qualifies me as a published author, but I’m going to keep pretending it does anyway.

I have even more respect than I did before for the crazy people who do the Marathon des Sables through the Sahara desert. I was feeling very lazy the other day so decided to go for a run, but the temperature was pushing 42 degrees at the time. It wasn’t a pleasant experience; I truly thought I was going to have a heart attack. I almost considered selling my iPod so I’d have money for a taxi home. One lady I passed along the way looked at me and said “Oh Oyibo, sorry sorry sorry”. I might refrain from any more running until it cools down a bit.

And on the subject of heat, I thought I’d got used to the temperature here by now, but recently nights here have been a little unbearable. Our electricity has been off a lot meaning no fan, and so I’ve been getting up numerous times each night and pouring a bucket of water over my head before going back to bed again. A couple of nights have been spent trying to sleep on the floor as the tiles are about the coolest thing in the flat when it’s that hot. Poor Squirt is feeling the heat as well - I keep finding her lying in the shower. And because the electricity has been bad, the water has been even worse as they need electricity to pump the water. It normally comes on from Monday to Friday, but over the past two weeks I can count the number of times we’ve had water on one hand. So when I came home last Thursday and found the man from the water board disconnecting our water I was less than impressed. I asked him how he could disconnect something that was never on anyway, but he said until everyone in the building paid their bill it would be disconnected. So I begged. And when that didn’t work I told him if he disconnected it I would follow him back to the water board office with the bag of dirty washing that was fast taking over my room and use their water supply. I think I scared him, but it worked and he left it on. I also now have his phone number and he told me to call him whenever we don’t have water. He may live to regret doing that – this was almost a week ago and we’ve had water once since then.

We got in a cab home the other night and even though we’d already negotiated the fare, the driver tried telling us that we should pay more because we “must have money because we’re white.” We explained we don’t have money, we’re volunteers, so he said “But you must have air conditioning at home, so you’ve got money.” So we explained we do not have air conditioning, we do not have a generator, we do not have any of the things he probably thinks we have. And you would think we had told him that we were living in a shack, “You don’t have air conditioning? You must be hot all the time. You come here to our country to help us and we don’t give you air conditioning?” So then from trying to get more money off us he changed to saying he wanted to write to the President and tell him what a disgrace it was that we don’t have air conditioning. I tried explaining that I think the President might have slightly more pressing matters to attend to than our lack of air conditioning. I was glad to get out of the cab. Although he still tried the standard “when you go home to UK you take me, or you bring me clothes and books for my baby” line.

My Abuja Cat Sanctuary is flourishing. Cat Two’s kittens are now 6 weeks old, running around, and also require feeding twice a day. How I went from saying I would never have any pets here to feeding 6 cats is beyond me. But one thing is for sure; I need a job, as my volunteer allowance doesn’t even cover the cost of me living in Abuja, let alone me and 6 cats. If anyone wants to sponsor the very first Nigerian Animal Shelter then let me know, I’ll willingly run it.

And FINALLY. This small health and safety risk caught my eye the other day. Never before have I been so glad that my job doesn’t involve me having to climb scaffolding.

Contraception? What's that?

I apologise in advance. This is more of a rant than a blog post.

I mentioned in my last post that we’d been running some focus groups in some rural FCT communities this week. Some data the organisation had collected showed that there was a very high rate of teen pregnancy in these communities, so we went to talk to the unmarried girls there to try and find out why the rate is so high, and how the program the organisation runs there can better help to tackle the problem.

And lets just say it was an eye opener. I knew that the focus groups would be run in pidgin, so I didn’t hold out much hope of being able to understand what was being said, but I was pleasantly surprised as I think I managed to understand about 90% of what they were talking about. But boy oh boy does it make you realise just how much of an issue there is here. The girls basically outlined the following issues as stopping them from using contraception:

• Their boyfriends/partners won’t use condoms.
• Even if their boyfriends/partners will use condoms, they won’t actually initiate the buying of the condoms, and any girls who are seen buying condoms in the community are seen as easy and looked down on.
• People in the community assume that anyone who is buying condoms is buying them to use them with someone other than their partner, so even men don’t feel able to go and buy them without being met with disapproval.
• The health centre in the community is supposed to provide contraception free of charge, but they very rarely have condoms available. If the girls go there for the injection or the contraceptive pill they can get it free for the first two visits, but then have to pay 500N for each visit from then on. 500N a month for the pill is out of reach for pretty much all of the girls in this community.
• Because of it being frowned upon for unmarried (and to a certain degree, even married) girls to access contraception, even if the health centre provided contraception free of charge (and accurate advice), the girls would be too embarrassed to go there.
• The men in the community practice “Juju” (magic) on the girls, so that they can have sex with them without the girls realising it has happened (a summarised version of their words – not mine). We had to ask several questions when we heard this to try and understand what they meant. They explained that the men put something in the girls’ food or drink that makes them “go to sleep.” And then they have sex with them. My colleague’s response to this was “do you mean rape?” and the girls replied, “no, not rape, its Juju - like charm.”

And on top of all of these issues, the health centre in the community provides inaccurate information. We asked one of the girls we spoke to to go there as a “mystery client” and ask for advice on contraception. She asked the person there what contraception they could give her to protect her from HIV and STI, and they told her condoms AND, wait for it …

… the injection.

I had to take some very deep breaths when she came back and told us this.

And this is a community a couple of hours from the centre of Abuja. It was definitely one of the days when I went home wondering how anything is ever going to change here.

And then later that day I read an article about the police force getting a new uniform. A camouflage uniform that will apparently also have magical powers, given these uniforms will, and I quote, “discourage them [police officers] from developing cold feet any time they come face to face with robbers.” Having collectively spent over 3 hours over the past 2 days sat at one of the checkpoints here, news that money was being spent on uniforms rather than training did not fill me with joy.

Vets, cats, fish and motorbikes

I’ve been a bit useless with updating my blog recently. I think it’s a combination between being busy and also having been here for long enough now to find everything normal, so I never think there’s anything worth writing about.

I took Squirt to the vet a couple of weeks ago for the blood test she needs to pass to get her entry to the UK. To cut a long story short, it was hideous, and I won’t be taking her to the vet again here if I can help it. They had to “sedate her” (this actually just involved paralysing her whilst keeping her wide awake) and the drug either didn’t agree with her, or she had too much. It was meant to last for 2 hours, but instead lasted well over 12 hours, and then it was another 2 days before she’d come out from under my bed, eat, drink or do anything. Thankfully she’s okay now, and so was her test result.

And Cat 2 has had her babies. I was outside feeding her the other night when I thought my foot felt a bit wet. Unusual in the dry season. And sure enough, her waters had broken over my flipflop. Lovely. She hid them well and so no one knew where they were for the first 2 weeks, but since they were found she seems to have moved them again. I can’t blame her, there aren’t many cat lovers out here so she’s very sensible to keep them out of the way.

I got two parcels the other day, which was pretty much the most exciting event to happen for quite some time. I had to sit at the Post Office for ages whilst they tried to find them, and then whilst Customs went through the contents. The lady at the Post Office asked me if I had any money in either parcel, or anything of any value, as I would need to remove it before she called the customs officers in. Nice, huh? The customs officers had a good old look through the contents, including the box of tampax. They were clearly looking for things to be able to “confiscate” but got rewarded with a number of items they didn’t recognise. I had thought one item might require some explanation – the catnip hedgehogs that I had asked my mum to send me for Squirt – knitted hedgehogs stuffed full of an unidentifiable dried herbal substance. This would presumably be the kind of thing that may attract at least a question from customs at home. But not so here. Squirt proved how much better she was feeling over the weekend – I buried the hedgehogs at the back of my wardrobe on the top shelf (which is higher than the top of my head) underneath all of my clothes, so that I could save them for when she’d destroyed all of her current toys. Not so, I woke up in the middle of the night to her burrowing through all of my clothes to get to the hedgehogs. How she could smell them from up there is beyond me.

I’ve been to a place called Abacha Barracks two weekends in a row now, and it’s my new favourite place to go for food here. They mainly sell massive barbequed fish, but they also do an alternative of omelette and chips for strange people like me. If I was to break my vegetarianism for anything it would probably be this fish though, it looked yummy and smelt amazing. It’s on the outskirts of Abuja, but has a great atmosphere and is well worth the trip. They also sell mangos as big as my head (well, almost) so that’s another good reason to go there.

And as if that excitement wasn’t enough, I discovered leeks in the supermarket the other day. I nearly cried with joy. They were AMAZING. Other than that I’ve generally spent the weekends swimming, reading, and drinking beer. Not bad really!

I spent the first two days of this week helping to run focus groups in some rural communities on the outskirts of Abuja. Despite still technically being classified as part of FCT (Federal Capital Territory) these communities are a world away from the rest of Abuja. The one we went to yesterday is only accessible by bike down a long sandy track, and is miles away from any main road. It’s probably the least developed place I’ve been to in my time here. On the bike on the way back my flipflop broke, and given I didn’t really want to head back to Abuja bare foot, I tried asking the driver to stop so I could fix it quickly before I lost it for good. Which is when he turned to me and I nearly passed out from the smell of alcohol fumes. It then transpired that he couldn’t actually understand a word I said, because even when I shouted “stop” he just nodded and carried on driving. I’m quite happy on the back of a bike, but not when the driver is drunk, and driving at a crazy speed down a sandy road. I weighed up how badly I’d injure myself if I jumped off, and decided that as my main fear was him crashing and us falling off anyway, it would probably be better to wait for that than to throw myself off unnecessarily. So I clung on for 25 minutes and did the truly Nigerian thing and prayed. And thankfully we got there in one piece. I think the driver could tell how angry I was by the time we arrived at the road though, and it’ll teach me to check the drivers eyes in future before jumping on the back of a bike – if they’re bright red and having trouble focusing, I won’t be getting on it!!!

We're all going on a Nigerian holiday

I’ve been to two lovely places recently that have made me like Nigeria even more than I did before. A couple of weeks ago we went to Usuma Dam for the afternoon (40 minutes outside Abuja). If my memory serves me correctly, this place isn’t in the Nigerian guidebook, and I have no idea why as it’s one of my favourite places that I’ve been to in Nigeria so far. We spent a lovely afternoon going on a boat across the reservoir, walking around the path that leads all the way around the dam, and swimming in the lovely warm water (whilst ignoring any thoughts about the possibility of contracting bilharzia!).

And I have just come back from spending 5 days in Obudu – this is somewhere I’ve wanted to go since before I even arrived in Nigeria, so when the 1 year mark hit I decided it was time to finally visit. We spent the first night in Obudu town, before heading 60km up the mountain, spending 2 nights in Abebe’s Lodge (phone number for anyone who wants to visit: 08036242192) and then a final night in Obudu town. I love Obudu. I want to live there and commute to Abuja each day. But as it’s at least an 8 hour journey, I’m thinking that probably wouldn’t be too practical. The top of the mountain has to be one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to. It almost looks like the end of the earth – all you can see for miles and miles is endless expanses of unspoilt mountain views. Some memorable moments:

1. Our first night in a “luxury” room in a hotel in Obudu town. I had wanted to book a hotel before we arrived, but my travelling companion reliably informed me this would not be necessary, there would definitely be a vacancy in the hotel that he wanted us to stay in. Not so. And several other hotels were also fully booked. So we couldn’t actually afford to be fussy by the time we finally found somewhere that had a room available. This hotel had the hardest bed I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. It was literally like sleeping on a tabletop.
2. Going up the mountain on the back of a motorbike. This wasn’t planned, we were meant to be going up by car, but the lift we were going to get never arrived, and then when we went to the park to find a car it was Sunday morning, so it was likely to take hours for the cars to fill. I was told over and over that I didn’t want to go up by bike because it would be “challenging”, but I also didn’t want to spend the whole day sat in the park waiting for the car to fill, so bike it was. And I’m very very glad as I got to see so much more by bike than I would have seen by car. Admittedly there were certain times during the two hours (I had a very sore behind afterwards!) when we were going up the “intestine road” (see photo which explains this name) when I thought we might plummet to our death, but our bike driver was very good. I do however pity him as I doubt he had any ribs left intact after having me clinging on to him for dear life for so long.

3. The views. Everywhere you went they were breathtaking.
4. Visiting “Holy Mountain.” According to our guide this was named Holy Mountain as during the Biafran war people were able to hide there and remain safe, so it was said that God must have protected them (presumably as the mountain is so frickin high that you actually feel like you’re in the sky when you’re stood on it!). I think it probably had more to do with the fact that the soldiers couldn’t actually find them, or reach them, given it was about as far from civilisation as you could hope to go. We went there on a Sunday afternoon and there was a church group on pilgrimage there. There must have been over 50 people on the top of the mountain all praying and chanting, and the cloud cover was really low, so it was all a bit eerie as more and more people emerged from the clouds as we got closer.

4. Being cold. Obudu is COLD. Not just Nigerian cold, but proper can’t-sleep-for-teeth-chattering-cannot-physically-face-a-cold-shower-cold.
5. Abebe’s Lodge. This is the “economical” place to stay. There is the Obudu Mountain Resort, but with the cheapest room being over 22,000 N (£88) and my monthly allowance being 36,000 N, this was slightly out of the VSO price range. So for 5,000 N we got a room at Abebe’s Lodge instead, which had running water, hot water when requested, and was perfectly clean. The staff were lovely, and it was right in the middle of the community, so I actually preferred it to the Mountain Resort (or so I told myself, anyway).
6. Being able to eat fried yam, akara and fried plantain for dinner every night.
7. Doing very little. It was lovely to just play scrabble, read books, and be lazy. I’m not normally very good at doing nothing, but I think I was pretty exhausted as life here has been busy recently, so it was definitely time for some down time and some space from Abuja and life here.
8. Walking along the canopy walk at the Becheve Nature Reserve. I’m a wimp and I hate heights. I blindly walked onto the canopy walk before realising or contemplating that it perhaps might be called a canopy walk for a reason, and was about a third of the way across before I actually looked down and realised I was suspended over the forest. On a rickety Nigerian walk way. But it was worth getting to the end and seeing the views from the viewing platform (providing I still didn’t look down).
9. Our hotel on our last night in Obudu. This is the hotel we had wanted to stay in during our first night, so we came down the mountain a day early in the hope it would have a room available as it was mid-week. And yes they did. We wanted to stay in this hotel for one very specific reason – each room has a bath with hot running water. So after spending 20 minutes investigating several rooms, and finally settling on the one with the biggest bath, I spent a very long time lying in lovely hot water. Granted, this was Nigeria, and so making a plug to fill the bath took some experimenting, but we got there in the end (who would have thought a pot of vaseline, a black plastic bag, and a big bucket could be so useful).