Martha

At one of the sites where I work - the one where Simon and I have our own office - there is a horseshoe of one-storey buildings (containing all of the offices). Where the horseshoe opens is where you'll find a big double gate as the entrance to the site, and by the entrance there are usually a handful of women selling food, snacks and cold soft drinks from large tubs.


One of these women is called Celeste. I started chatting to her one day because she had three beautiful children, so I asked what their names were. The little girl was Janet, the boy Emmanuel and the baby strapped to her back was called Martha. Since then I've been talking to her when I pass or buy a drink, saying hello to the children and once even having a quick hold of Martha who was fascinated by trying to grab my earrings and glasses.


Celeste disappeared for a while, but that's not unusual - we had a sallah public holiday and normally it takes quite a while for people to come back to work here after a holiday. When I came into work on Tuesday I was pleased to see her again, and asked her how she'd been. "Fine" is the obligatory and ubiquitous response to that question in Nigeria. I noticed she didn't have the baby strapped to her back, so I asked, smiling, where Martha was, expecting to hear that she was with a relative or something. "She died".


Martha died on 9th October. When I asked Celeste why, she simply said "She got sick". I assume she couldn't afford healthcare, or not the sort of healthcare which could have accurately diagnosed whatever life-threatening (life-taking) illness she had.


I know that death is a part of life, and an even bigger part of life in developing countries. I know that that's the reason people traditionally have large families here and I know that people - children - frequently die out here for unknown reasons. But this really took the wind out of my sails. 


Celeste looked more drained than usual, but there were no tears in her eyes. I had no idea what to say, apart from 'I'm so sorry'. Maybe the lack of tears are because the grieving process has to be over more quickly out here, where people die all the time and if you don't get back to work, your family doesn't eat. Maybe. Maybe the unquestioning, all-consuming belief in God and an afterlife helps. I don't know. But I can't believe that, inside, Celeste is in any less pain than any other mother would be if they lost their child.

Snippets

Wow - it's been a long time since I blogged. So, I thought you might like some snippets of life in the last couple of weeks...


I worked for 9 days straight in Zaria on two consecutive (in fact, overlapping) workshops. Absolutely exhausting, but really rewarding. Got to know my colleagues a bit better (since we were living in the hotel there, eating and socialising together as well as working) and was able to deliver a number of the sessions. Lots of challenges and lots of learning - exactly what I ordered.


Then we had a 3 day VSO workshop in Abuja on 'Gender'. Some interesting discussions among other volunteers about gender in their workplaces and in their respective cultures, but in general some highly questionable course content. This included strong advocacy for positive discrimination towards women ("because men have enjoyed the benefits of gender discrimination for centuries, so it's only fair we redress the balance now"), the assertion that "rape is always a premeditated act" and that men who rape when they are drunk only got drunk in the first place as Dutch courage to help them do it, and finally the advice that if nuns running a charity want to favour women staff "that's ok, because they are women so they probably prefer women". Oh, and the facilitator's very first greeting to me was "Oh, you're Simon's wife." Oh dear.


Last weekend, we had a visit from Gayl, an Irish volunteer who was in our intake in June but whose 6 month placement is about to come to an end (reminding me that we have now been here for nearly half a year, and a third of our placement time!). This gave us an excuse to go to the Hausa Theatre in Kaduna, which we've been meaning to go to for a while. Some great music and dancing, a packed and almost exclusively male crowd and some drama which we couldn't understand.


Last Saturday we went to a Bazaar held by the NGO that another volunteer works for and picked up a few second hand bargains. It was very like a church fete, complete with a Lucky Dip stand where small Nigerian children bellowed into a microphone "Keeeeep trying!" and "Try your best!". While there, we popped next door to a farm which has a restaurant, pottery shop etc - the kind of tourist attraction you can easily imagine in Cornwall or rural France or something. I visited the bathroom there, and when I flushed the loo, 2 tiny little live frogs appeared from under the toilet rim, bobbed around in the water for a bit and then climbed back up there!


Thanks to another Irish girl we've met in Kaduna who is working at an International School here, we've been able to take advantage of her membership of the Zaki Club recently. There's a pool and a bar which also serves decent food (best chips in Kaduna, if you ask me). Sunning myself on a lounger, with a cold beer and looking up at the palm trees, I could have been in a holiday resort! Very relaxing and indulgent. 


And finally, I'm starting to feel really quite chilly at times. Nothing makes you feel more like a local in Africa than feeling cold.


That's all folks - I'll try to blog once more before we go home for Christmas in 10 days.

Language

When we arrived in Nigeria, we were given 1 hour of language training in Hausa, which included being told to go out onto the streets outside the hotel and practise using the few phrases we had learnt. I can tell you, the few men we managed to find on the streets were pretty bemused at being asked if they were hungry and whether they had a wife!

Since then, I have been trying to pick up the language here and there. I can manage greetings (which are pretty lengthy here), pleasantries and using transport, but anything beyond is more tricky. There are several people who have vowed to teach us, and who are indeed trying, but mainly this consists of them gabbling complicated Hausa sentences at us and then laughing when we don't understand. Then they translate it for us, but it's often difficult to get them to break it down into component parts, so we end up just learning whole sentences by rote which we will almost certainly never need to use (take, for example, "You and your wife have the same complexion." Certainly it would often be true, but why would I ever want to say it?!).

Another challenge, is that a lot of dialogue here seems to be simply stating a fact about what is occurring. For example, "You came". Or "You're working". Or "You're eating bananas early in the morning" (really, someone said this to me). This, to me, doesn't require much response, aside from maybe "Yes". But when I respond in that way, they translate as if I didn't understand - what are they expecting me to say?! I'm toying with the idea of learning the Hausa for 'No, I'm still at home', so that I can at least respond to "You came?" with irony.

True love lasts a lifetime

I thought that having a simpler, more basic existence in Nigeria would make me appreciate the smaller things in life and realise the insignificance of the trivialities that consumed my days in the UK. I’d hoped I might gain a little perspective on my consumerist, materialistic ways.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case. On the contrary – I am all the more impressed with fancy hotels, burger and chips, air conditioning, pizza, nice bathrooms, television, etc. because they have now become a prized rarity.

And far from weaning myself off reality TV, I am actually following it with more vigour, reading endless LiveBlogs for the many and varied shows that seem to be gracing British terrestrial channels at the moment. The wonderful thing about it, is that I am no longer hindered by the fact that I cannot (try as I might) always be in on a Saturday night, nor by the fact that many of these shows seem to clash in the scheduling. No, I can read the Guardian’s fabulously sarcastic minute by minute commentary whenever I have time (and internet connection, and electricity), and it’s not only like I’m watching it, but like I’m watching it with witty friends!

Perhaps this is all a good thing. Perhaps what I’m learning is not that calorific comfort food and crappy telly are just traps laid by the unhealthy society I was living in, but that they are, as it turns out, genuine love affairs that overcome the barriers of distance, time and culture.

Marriage

I’ve been having a few conversations with Nigerians about marriage recently.

The men at one of our offices take great pleasure in trying to wind me up, by saying that they’re going to make a real man out of Simon: that he should be in charge and I should submit to him. When I protest, they shrug and say “That’s our culture.” I point out to them that I understand but that it’s not my culture and that I was born, raised and married in a different culture.

One man came into the middle of a meeting I was having the other day, and asked me where my husband was. Now there are two Hausa words for husband – ‘megida’ and ‘miji’. I knew this. What I didn’t realize until a colleague explained it to me at that point, was that ‘miji’ just means husand; but ‘megida’ actually means head of the household (literally ‘master’ (me) of the ‘house’ (gida)).

I told the man that there was no head of our household, that we were both equal. “Ah, but only one person can drive a car.” (Nigerians like stories and metaphors). Yes, but when that person gets tired, the passenger can take over and become the driver – you can share the responsibility. He thought for a second. “Ah, but a ship only has one captain!”. Ok, but this isn’t a ship. “Someone has to be in front – you can’t be side by side.” And it seemed to really irk him that, in my marriage, both parties are equal. 

Finally, I told him my husband was in the office, and he should go and ask him who’s in charge. He shook his head. “No, but he will say what you say, because” – and at this point he made a gesture like adjusting two volume knobs at the same time – “you have been programming him”.  Honestly.

I’m glad to say that my female colleague also disagreed with him and is perfectly clear that both she and her husband see their marriage as a partnership. Thank God!

I think this attitude (which I’m told is African, rather than just a Nigerian) has to do with the obsession with hierarchy here. It is simply inconceivable to most Nigerians that two people could stand side by side and be equal in something: a Nigerian always knows whether he is hierarchically above or below the person standing next to him. (This also explains some of the difficulty I’ve had in delivering training on ‘peer mentoring’!)

The other night, we had a couple of beers on our porch with our neighbour, Tony. He has recently moved in because he was transferred (by the bank he works for) from the South East to Kaduna. His pregnant wife and two small children are still living in the South East and he visits them once a month.

I told Tony about my conversations about marriage, and he told me that it often has to do with the man not wanting to appear ‘weak’. If a man is equal to his wife, in Nigerian culture this makes him not a real man. He was explaining to us that although he would say his marriage is a partnership, when they are in public, they try to make it look like he is in charge (for example, his wife was mortified when he swept the floor while she had friends in the house!).

He also amused us by reminding us that, when he had just moved in, we were pottering around on our porch and I said to him something like ‘You must come over and have a beer with us some time’. Apparently, this shocked him: that a woman should do the inviting and that that her invitation should involve alcohol was new to him! He told his wife on the phone that night “I have some white neighbours and the woman invited me over for a drink!”

“What?! Why didn’t the husband invite you?”

“He was sweeping.”

Lagos

Last week I travelled to Lagos for a workshop. I didn’t get to see much of it, because I was working, but it was still an experience.

I took my first internal flight in Nigeria. The airports were interesting: no obvious check-in desks at Kaduna airport, no checking of ID, no screens displaying flight details. When we landed at Lagos airport, the tiny baggage reclaim room (with a single, linear conveyor belt against one wall, measuring not more than five or six metres) filled up quickly with passengers from our flight. But, for some reason, airport workers decided to wait for three more flights to land before releasing any of the baggage; so that tiny hot space was packed with loud, shove-y, Lagos women, pushing to get to the conveyor belt which wasn’t even moving let alone carrying any bags!

The drive across town from the airport to the hotel was the nearest I got to experiencing real Lagos. There is certainly a lot of traffic. Okadas (some of which have sawn off the ends of their handlebars to make it easier to swerve between traffic!) look quite terrifying. And it’s huge – when we were coming into land, it just seemed to go on forever!

The rest of the three days were spent in a nice hotel with A/C, nice food and a gym. I was facilitating some of the sessions in the workshop, and it was great to have something concrete to do. My colleague had brought her 3 year old and 1 year old daughters, so outside of workshop sessions, I spent a lot of time with them. And it was so much fun!! I took the 3 year old (Sabrina) into the pool a couple of times and she was just so excited about it – it was lovely. A really very enjoyable few days.

Halloween and Harmattan

I know halloween is a very American "holiday", but it provides a good excuse to do something different. So we did. We bought a huge pumpkin from the market - the smallest they had, but still enormous! - and Simon carried it home, crammed into his rucksack, on the back of an okada. 


We spent a long time scooping out the flesh, and trying to think of ways to use it up. A couple of batches of pumpkin muffins weren't bad, and I even iced them (although a combination of slightly-too-wet icing and Nigerian heat meant they were just sort of swimming in a gooey mess on the plate). We roasted some of it, to have with our roast dinner on Sunday and the remainder sits accusingly in the fridge. God there's a lot of flesh in a pumpkin!


A volunteer from Akwanga (Lucy, with whom we stayed for a few days in our first couple of weeks in Nigeria) was staying with us for the weekend, and carved a beautiful Pob-like face into the hollowed-out pumpkin - next door's children were slightly confused by the practice - and we lit a candle in it on a NEPA-less night (we still only get electricity for some of every second day). Lots of fun!


The season seems to have changed overnight. At the end of last week, it was still definitely rainy season. Ok, there were slightly longer pauses between rain storms, but it was definitely very wet and thundery. Then, we left the house on Saturday evening, and suddenly the ground was much drier and the sky incredibly hazy - almost like fog. There was no huge storm to round off the rainy season, no warning - just in the blink of an eye, it now seems to be harmattan, and the haze in the sky is the dust that it brings with it.


So far I'm liking it: it can be quite cool at times, the haze should make for some beautiful sunsets and I'm just so happy that I can now go out and not worry about whether I'm going to be able to get home before it rains!

The mystery of The Brown Splodge, Part III

So far, no-one and nothing has returned for the final piece of bread. Whatever it was, it seems the poison worked. Until next time...

The mystery of The Brown Splodge, Part II

As I was pottering around at home yesterday afternoon, I found two actual poos: one by the front door, one by the bed, and both as big as those oversized jelly beans you get in liquorice allsorts (torpedoes?). Now I come to think of it, I think they’ve been there a couple of days and I was just in denial, subconsciously convincing myself that they were just bits of dirt from my shoe, or a dead insect or something.

So, I went straight out to find some rat poison. You’d think it would have been easier to get hold of than it was, but nonetheless, I eventually found a shop that sold it and bought 10 packets (I wasn’t taking any chances).

As recommended by the shopkeeper in broken English, I tore a slice of bread into four pieces and placed each on the lid from a jar or tupperware. I then sprinkled two packets of the very, very fine, dark grey powder (who ever thought it would be a good idea to make a poisonous substance so fine that it puffs up into the air so you can breathe it right in?!) over the four pieces. I placed one lid by each of the poo sites, one near the kitchen (figuring it was probably after food) and the final, biggest one by the drainage pipe in the bathroom – the only possible entry point I could identify, unless he was casually strolling in through the open door on a sunny afternoon.

Within half an hour of putting the poison in place, I heard a slight scratching in the bathroom. When I looked in, the entire piece of bread – a piece the size of my palm – had gone! In broad daylight, and while I pottered in the other room with the radio on, the beast had snuck in and stolen a piece of food half the size of his body. 

Now, I don’t like rodents. In fact, that’s a bit of an understatement: ever since a mouse ran out from under my pillow whilst I was in the bed (London mice are the cheekiest, stupidest little creatures), you could say I’ve had a bit of a phobia. But the brilliant thing about being out here and being afraid of everything, is that, it’s helped me to put certain fears into perspective. For most of the things I’m scared of, when I ask myself “What’s the worst that could happen?”, the answer is usually death. So when something comes along that in can’t really hurt me, let alone kill me, I’m actually pretty thankful. Nonetheless, my knees were wobbling a bit.

So I moved two of the other pieces of bread to what I now knew was his entry point, leaving the one in the bedroom in the hope that it would remain untouched and I could convince myself before going to sleep that he didn’t like coming into the bedroom. I went out to meet up with some other volunteers for a couple of hours, and when I came back, the other two pieces in the bathroom had disappeared. 

Assuming that Nigerian rats were considerably smarter and more cunning than London mice (since it was managing to steal large pieces of bread without me even seeing it), I wandered round the house carrying the radio and with heavy footfall to make sure it knew I was back. The bread in the bedroom remained untouched; relieved, I moved it into the bathroom. I jumped straight into bed and tucked the net in extra tight (thank God for mosquito nets!).

This morning, the final piece of bread is still there (a three course bread-and-poison meal is probably enough for any rat), and I can neither see nor smell any signs of dead rat inside the house. And I have to say, I’m pretty proud of myself for dealing with it all on my own and managing to spend the night in a house with a rat.

Of course, there’s a big assumption I’m making here. Having never seen it, and not being an expert on animal droppings, all I know is that something or someone is sharing (and pooing in) my house and it likes bread but can’t manage a fourth piece. Who’s to say it’s actually a rat…?

The mystery of The Brown Splodge

Our transformer still isn't fixed, but apparently we are now sharing one with another line; so we get NEPA one day, and they get it the next, and so on. Obviously, NEPA isn't a continuous concept, so you only get it for part of your allotted day, if you're lucky, but at least this has introduced a degree of predictability which we never had before. Fortuitously, the lovely 'Sea Breeze' (a bar with a garden and gorgeous view of the river. Though not the sea. But there is breeze.) is on the other line, so whenever our fridge is off, their beers should be nice and cold.


This means that many nights are spent in the dark, sweating from the general heat and also that generated by the candles, hoping that the laptop battery will last until the end of whatever episode I'm watching and trying to hear anything other than the whirr of generators (all of our neighbours seem to have them). 


Last night, while watching an episode of Glee in the dark, I closed all doors to the living room to block out some of the noise. And when I opened it again, there on the floor was a small, brown splodge. It was directly underneath the open hatch into the roof, so I looked up to see if I could see or hear anything up there. I couldn't. I got some loo roll, wiped it up and - and I know this is disgusting - sniffed it. It smelled of fish. The only explanation I could think of, was that there was some fish-eating beast with diarrhoea in my home (or somehow, expertly squatting over the side of the hatch to do his/her business, but then I reasoned that if you've got diarrhoea, you probably don't have the strength in your leg muscles to attempt that). 


I didn't look too hard for this beast. Instead, I went to bed, tucking my mosquito net in extra tightly and turning up the volume on my ipod. There was no further evidence this morning. The mystery continues...

7 days and counting...

Today is our 7^th day in a row without NEPA (mains electricity). Apparently the transformer has broken, which means that our whole road has no power (or ‘light’ as Nigerians would say). The volunteers who live on the next road also had no NEPA for a few days and were also told it was something to do with a transformer, but somehow their power is back and ours is still off.

This has meant that most of the food in our fridge has gone off. We had got complacent and started to cook up batches of food to store in there and to buy large amounts of vegetables at the weekend to last us the week; so most of that went off and we’re now back to buying food on a daily basis.

It has also meant that we’ve had to make sure that we take our appliances to work every day (laptop, phone charger, ipods, digital radio/speaker) to charge up. This hasn’t been too hard – I’ve been at a workshop at a hotel for most of the week, and since Nigerians are used to the electricity problem, it’s not thought at all odd to plug in your various things to charge around the workshop room!

It was frustrating at first that we couldn’t have the fans on in the evening – especially since, with no light, we use candles to see by, which only adds to the heat in the house! But I think we’re getting used to it, and the fans really were a luxury in the first place.

I think the main thing I miss when we have no electricity – apart from being able to watch DVDs or email without worrying about the laptop battery – is being able to have a cold drink. We boil and filter our water, and so it always ends up tasting like the filter ‘candles’ which are made out of something chalky; not the worst taste in the world, and when we’re thirsty, we’ll drink it, but so much nicer when it’s cold and you can’t really taste the calcium in it!

I learnt from Facebook that a volunteer elsewhere in Nigeria went without electricity for 20 days. That’s the kind of thing I wish I didn’t know. It’s like when you have hiccups, and you think “It’s ok – they can’t last forever.” And then you remember that woman who got into the Guinness Book of World Records for having hiccups that lasted 29 years. I’m sure this won’t last 29 years. And even if it does, the bar down the road has a generator and a fridge full of beer.

Fear, Part II

(NB: This was written on Friday 24th September, but until now I haven't had sufficient internet connection to post it.)

On Monday of this week, I lay awake for most of the night because I was convinced there was a rat in my bedroom. As it turned out, it was just two huge cockroaches, making an unusually large amount of noise.

On Wednesday I had my phone stolen from my desk at work, and then, on the way home, got caught in a sudden and vicious rainstorm with winds so strong that my okada driver and I had to cower behind a car at the side of the road for several minutes, while the storm – and various large wind-borne objects – swirled around us. When I thought it had passed, we drove on, only to meet more rain on the way, at which point – since I was near to one of our offices – I stopped the bike and went in search of a dry seat and a cup of tea. No such luck – the office was all closed up for some reason, so I just had to wait until it was dry-ish and chance it. At home and having changed out of my wet clothes, I did the only thing you can do at the end of a day like that: ate Nutella from the jar with a big spoon.

And I wish I could say today had been better. But last night at around 9pm we received a phonecall from a colleague saying that there were rumours that there a group of Muslims were planning to strike out against Christians in Kaduna today and that we should stay indoors (the actual words used were "The Muslims have been urged to rise up and kill the Christians"). A few calls to and fro with VSO confirmed that the security services and the British Consulate had also heard that there was an attack planned and that we should stay at home for the day.

Natural worrier that I am, and since we live in an entirely Christian area of town, my mind went into overdrive. I was imagining all kinds of scenes from Half of  A Yellow Sun or various films I’d seen, and I was terrified. To be fair to myself, the scenes I was imagining were no worse than violence that has been seen in Nigeria as recently as March this year in Jos. I slept badly and have been on edge all day – making sure the gate to our compound was locked, jumping at every noise and generally being miserable.

As far as we can tell, nothing came of it. We heard that the rumours started because of an incident in an area out of town last night: the police shot two okada drivers and then, in retaliation, the police station was burnt down. Apparently a group of people were threatening to come into the city to cause trouble today; but they either didn’t or the security services intercepted them.

Talking to another volunteer based in Kwara state, she too a said that near them there were attacks last night and lots of sirens today. I hope this isn’t the beginning of a long and troubled lead-up to the election in January. I hope I manage to ‘master my fear’, as Iorek Byrnison would say. Because, if I’m honest, right now, I think I’d just like to go home, have 2.4 children and have the greatest danger I face be my overdraft.

It's not as Black and White as that

For those of you reading from the UK – or, I imagine, most of the white Western World – I’d like you to imagine that you are white and, walking down the street, you see a black person. Or perhaps a black person works for your organisation (not much of a stretch of the imagination for most of you, I wouldn’t have thought). Now imagine, walking up to that person in the street or at your workplace and saying ‘black man’ at him, or waving and shouting ‘blacky!’.

Exactly. It doesn’t bear thinking about. And, in most workplaces, it may well be a sackable offence.

So imagine my discomfort, surprise, perplexity when, on a more than daily basis, Nigerians shout ‘Baturia!’ or 'Oyibo!’ (respectively, Hausa and Igbo for ‘white person’) at me as I walk down the road. Or when people call ‘Whitey!’ or, on one occasion ‘Yellow!’ (?!) after me as they pass in their cars.

My first instinct, as my brain rapidly translates what’s going on, is an instinctive outrage. If anyone at home mentioned the colour of someone’s skin, unless it was absolutely relevant, I’d call them on it. I would expect a black person in the UK to be utterly offended if someone drove past them and shouted ‘Blacky’!

But out here, it is not an insult at all. Firstly, the fact is, that people have seen so few white people that sometimes they are genuinely shocked and a revelling in the rarity. Secondly, it’s actually – somewhat disgustingly – a mark of respect: maybe as a legacy of colonization, maybe as a result of how the developed-developing split in the world works, people here really look up to white people. And actually, when you translate ‘Baturia’, it actually means European, or something similar – it’s not a direct reference to the colour of my skin. It does make me wonder, though, how a black volunteer from the UK would be treated here; and how the VSO volunteers from Kenya or Uganda are treated by their Nigerian partner organisations.

The other day, as I was sitting in my boss’s office, one of my colleagues was explaining what another colleague of ours was doing. “She’s going to be coming in later.” Pause for effect. “With some White People.” Try as I might, I couldn’t hide the smile on my face, but I realised that what he was actually saying was that she was coming with some people who deserved our respect – they were foreign consultants and, he was assuming, more knowledgeable in their field than any of us.

Disgusting as it is to me, being called ‘white’ is a compliment here.

The Durbar in Kano

This weekend was a four day national holiday because of Eid, so lots of us volunteers travelled up to Kano - ancient city in the Muslim North of the country - for the durbar.

The durbar is a festival at which all of the local districts put on a display of men and horses, all dressed up in amazing outfits, some of them dancing and playing music. They parade around the town and then present themselves to the Emir at his palace. Apparently (so Simon’s told me – why have a husband and read the guide book yourself?), in days gone by, the Emir would call upon all of the local traditional leaders/chiefs to present all of their horses and all of their men so that he could see what resources were at his disposal before deciding to go to war.

It was amazing to see such a display of local culture. I have to say, though, it was a little bit scary. For a start, we were already a bit concerned about being a group of white people in a centre of Islam on the same day that an American was threatening to burn the Qur’an. When we arrived at the Emir's palace on Saturday, we were ushered through to take seats at the side of the arena (for no other reason than we were white, it seems - most Nigerians were waiting outside and watching through the railings, while those around us had either paid or been invited by someone important).

Since we were on time (very un-Nigerian), it was pretty empty for quite a while; then just before it started, the place filled up really rapidly - people sitting on the stairs, in the gangways, on the floor - and I suddenly realised that our nearest exit, should we need it, was a very long way away and almost impossible to get to should we want to leave in a hurry.

The durbar is pretty loud, with lots of drums banging, pipes playing and people shouting and screaming, so I was never sure whether there was something kicking off and the crowds were turning violent, or whether it was part of the performance. At one point there was a political rally outside the compound (a general election has been called for January and politics here can get quite nasty), which started a bit of a scuffle, but the police (heavily armed, supported by soldiers sitting on top of tanks) put a stop to it. Then halfway through the parade, there was suddenly an explosion in the centre of the courtyard which made many people scream; this was followed by 3 more explosions and then members of the Nigerian Red Cross running into the arena and carrying a lifeless body away. Now, since everything else continued without missing a beat, and since at the end of the performance there were lots more of those explosions in a more ordered fashion to round off the event, I assume that either it was meant to happen, or someone let off four of the bangs too soon. Nonetheless, I was more than a little shaky as we walked back along the main road – packed with people and horses, not to mention the motorbikes and other traffic which hadn't been diverted for the event.

On the second day, there was an event at Government House, and a colleague of one of the Kano volunteers managed, somehow, to get us 12 seats inside, in a room with a maximum of 200 people in it, four rows behind the Emir himself, and on seats that were marked ‘Diplomats’. Amazing. As people were filing in, the master of ceremonies explained in English, for the benefit of those of us who don’t speak Hausa (our lot, a group of German students here to learn Hausa (?!), the Spanish Ambassador and the EU Envoy to Nigeria), that over 100 years ago, the tradition began that the day after the main durbar event at the Emir’s palace, the Emir would visit the Governor of Kano at Government House to bring to him any issues which had arisen among his people and to hear what the Governor was doing about them.

Only 1 hour late, the Emir arrived amid a procession of horses, just as the day before. He himself sits high on a horse under a large parasol; his face is veiled, and there are 4 attendants around him, fanning flies away and clearing the crowds. He was carrying a staff and a ceremonial dagger, and he was wearing a truly extraordinary hat (like an oversized bowler hat, but red with decorations on it – like something you could imagine an amateur dramatics group making out of papier mache if they were doing a stage version of Paddington Bear). His attendants were also spectacularly dressed – the largest turbans in the whole parade and huge glittery robes, with very large shoulder padding, which they held out to shield the Emir at various points as he was sitting down.

Once he was sat in his white and lime green throne, all of the district heads then came in, each one prostrating himself on the red carpet in front of the Emir, before taking his seat. The Emir led everyone in prayer and then made his speech, and the Governor responded – all in a Hausa monotone, so not terribly interesting for us I have to say. An hour later, it was all finished: the District Heads left first (again, kneeling and bowing down to him before leaving), then the Emir. We went outside to the grounds to watch the procession of the same horsemen as the day before, but this time we were stood right at the side of their path and they were close enough to touch! The Emir passed right by us. And in fact, in order to leave, we had to walk along that same path, against the flow of horses (which are all understandably unhappy about wearing all of that finery, and not necessarily under the control of these men who don’t seem all that comfortable in the saddle) – another adventure outside of the Health & Safety box of the UK!

Barka da Sallah!

Today is the first day of a four-day weekend in Nigeria to mark Sallah – the feast to mark the end of Ramadan.

Yesterday, as the okada I was riding neared my workplace, we drove straight through a river of blood. I didn’t get chance to see where it was coming from, but the driver confirmed that it was coming from the animals they were slaughtering for the Sallah feast.

As I walked into the compound of our offices, I saw that my boss was already there (this was at 8.30 in the morning – I was technically 30 minutes late for work, but I have never seen him there before 9am), so I waved and walked over to him. It was only as I came close to him and the woman he was talking to that I noticed the activity to my right. On a raised concrete platform, there were about eight men hacking at bovine carcasses with hatchets, knives and other instruments; a short distance away, on a bright yellow plastic sheet spread out on the ground, another group of men sliced chunks of flesh, tore membranes from meat and washed and cleaned cow innards

My boss confirmed that shortly before I arrived they had slaughtered three cows in order to give some meat to every employee for the Sallah feast. I looked beyond the raised platform and saw another four men grappling with what looked like a live cow on its back; on closer inspection it turned out to be a dead cow with its head cut off which the men were skinning. He told me that the cows had been ‘troublesome’: “One of them, as we were trying to tie her up, broke her leg! Then, when we were dragging another of them across the courtyard, she broke her leg too!!’ He laughed and the woman next to him joined in, chuckling merrily and proclaiming with a smile “They didn’t want to be killed!!”. I’m no vegetarian, but this kind of humour when we were surrounded by the fresh flesh of the same animals made me feel slightly uncomfortable.

Later, after a morning shower of rain had passed, I went back out to take some photos of the event. I chatted to a colleague about what we thought the best bits of the cow were in terms of meat: she was absolutely horrified that we didn’t eat the head in the UK, and bemused by the fact that we didn’t eat the heart or intestines (so much so, that she repeated the question several times, as if I might not have understood). For the record, she said that Nigerians probably thought the neck was the best bit.

My boss returned to the scene. He walked over to the piles of meat, picked up a very large lump – difficult to identify: surrounded by a rounded membrane, looking almost like I’d imagine a stomach to look like, but with recognisable, steak-like meat inside – and said “How would it be if I gave you this?”. Now, we’d had a brief conversation the day before, so I was prepared for the fact that I would probably be given something from the slaughter, so I wasn’t too shocked and very gratefully accepted. Nonetheless, walking back across the courtyard to my office, I felt mildly hysterical about the fact that I had a heavy, unwrapped, unidentified chunk of beef in a carrier bag in my hand, and that I was going to just plop it onto the desk and get on with my day until home-time.

I left work early, and hurriedly texted other volunteers to see if they would come over and help us eat this enormous quantity of meat.  Simon and I then spent 45 minutes trying to cut this huge lump into more manageable pieces, using knives, scissors, hands; we are inexpert butchers. With that task out of the way – feeling slightly nauseated and with hands wreaking of raw meat – we were finally able to start cooking, and managed a very respectable beef stew (although the ratio of meat to veg was approximately 3:1) which we shared with 5 others. Happy Sallah!

Noises Off

Just as timekeeping doesn’t hold the same weight of etiquette and manners in Nigeria as it does in Britain, neither, it seems, do noise levels.

This morning I was woken by the young boy who lives next door singing ‘Hallelujah’ repeatedly outside our bedroom window. An hour later, when the NEPA had gone off and I was sitting reading on the porch with a cup of tea, the thundering generators started up. To top it all off, our neighbour on the other side then started to play Backstreet Boys tracks very loudly whilst she, on her own porch, sang along at the top of her voice, and – I’m afraid it has to be said – in more of a shout than tuneful melody.

I have to say, it doesn’t really bother me (for one thing, I quite like the nostalgic chord that the Backstreet Boys strike), but there’s a strong British urge to complain which it’s quite hard to suppress. My natural reaction is to be indignant – in my world, to create any sort of noise which is audible to others in their home, is impolite, intrusive, and – at certain levels – illegal. Here, however, I don’t think there is any thought given to whether people can hear the music you’re playing, or the noise of your gargantuan generator (actually, I don’t know how big they are, since they’re behind a wall, but they sound like massive monsters). And just as with timekeeping, that’s probably because there’s no chance of another Nigerian being offended by the noise you’re creating.

Necessity is the enemy of indignation (sorry – I’ve been reading Shantaram, and it’s made me want to make a philosophical point with every second sentence). But the point is, complaining and getting indignant about things around us are luxuries – as is privacy. In our compound, there are four houses; three are attached to each other, and the fourth (the landlord’s) is separated from ours by an alleyway of about two feet in width. Behind our house is another alley of the same width, then, just the other side of a high wall, another compound. So given that no-one in Nigeria gets a constant supply of mains electricity, of course some people are going to have generators, and when you’re living in such close proximity to others, there’s really no point in worrying about whether people will be disturbed by it – it’s a just a fact of life that everyone accepts.

The music is perhaps less to do with necessity, and more to do with the joyful spirit – both religious and generally – of people here. And it makes me wonder, why would anyone ever want to tell someone to shut up when they’re so happy they’re singing out loud? Then I remember the tinny sound of a mobile phone playing R&B on the top of a London bus, because the one person who wants to listen to it has decided to play it out loud and force everyone to listen to it rather than use earphones, and I’m right back to being British, quietly seething about the bad manners of our youth.

Timekeeping

Why does it make me so angry when people don’t keep to time? When workshops overrun by up to three hours? When something actually commences several hours after the publicised start time? And why doesn’t it bother Nigerians? Why does it not even bother those who have turned up on time, that they are hanging around for ages, waiting for others to arrive so the meeting can start, and wasting time that could have been spent on other things?

It seems to me that punctuality, in Nigerian culture, has nothing to do with respect. For me, with my cultural background, keeping people waiting, arriving late and not starting at the time I said I would are all acts of rudeness and disrespect for those I am keeping waiting. For me, it’s the equivalent of saying “What I have to do is more important than anything you might have sacrificed to be here.”.

But here, where people are far more laid back, where no-one ever expected things to start on time, where there’s nothing really pressing waiting to be done (because if there was, you wouldn’t have left it in the first place) – no-one really cares if things keep to time. And in the case of some workshops, the only reason people turned up in the first place was to get their per diems, so it doesn’t really matter whether the activities start on time.

It also seems that, when the prompt close of a workshop session – even that on a Friday afternoon – depends on there being no lengthy discussion on the final points, my Nigerian colleagues still prefer to make their points and finish the discussion rather than finish on time. So throw out that idea of the Nigerian work ethic being lazy, or people being focused more on their own needs rather than achieving their work goals: these people prefer to get the job done right rather than get home on time.

Leadership

Soon after I arrived in my post here, in an attempt to figure out what I could usefully contribute, I conducted 1-2-1s with every member of the team I’m working with to find out what they felt about their role, what they thought needed to change in the department and what made them want to come to work in the mornings. Overwhelmingly, the single clearest message from these meetings was that the motivating factor for all of them was the Head of the department: the fact that he is so busy and works so hard makes them want to do well in their jobs (“If you’re boss isn’t sleeping, you won’t sleep either.”).

I’ve been very fortunate, thus far, to have worked mainly for excellent – and in some cases truly exceptional – leaders, and on the few occasions when I haven’t, it’s completely destroyed my motivation to do any work. So I have to say I’m relieved that that part of the jigsaw is clearly in place here – a good place to start from. Particularly because Nigerian culture is very hierarchical - if the boss tells you to do something, you do it.

Last weekend we had dinner with our boss from the Funder – a huge relief to clarify some things about our roles, why we’re here, what they want us to do, etc. – and it made me realize: all I need to be content in a job is a good leader. If I believe in the person at the top and I know they’re on the ball, I can quite happily put up with a lot of things. But what kind of a person does that make me? The kind of person who goes along with anything so long as the person telling me to has charisma and seems to know what they’re talking about? The kind of person who votes for Tony Blair, that’s who. 

The Simple Life

The thing I love most about living in Nigeria so far is the simplicity of my life out here. It would be naïve, patronizing and almost certainly inaccurate to say that people in developing countries live more simply than we in the West do – having only seen how a handful of Nigerians live, I couldn’t possibly make that judgment. But my life here is far less complicated than it was at home. With frequent loss of power, no television, and a far reduced social life, I have more time to read, and think – and just be. It’s calmer, less frenetic, less guilt-ridden. I don’t have long to-do lists and somehow, even though household tasks should take longer out here (e.g. hand washing), there’s not that same feeling of ‘I really should go and…’every time I sit down.

In large part I suspect that’s to do with my job. I’m not saying volunteering isn’t challenging – far from it. Working within an entirely different culture in an ill-defined role can, at times, be hugely frustrating and confusing. But it’s less hectic; not only because I’m a volunteer and am supposed to be supporting and facilitating rather than jumping in and doing things, but also because the work ethic is very different out here. Added to which, the lack of power and computers means there is no email culture, which in turn means communication takes a LOT longer and slows the decision-making process right down.

I had worried about my health while I‘m volunteering: 18 months without a trip to the dentist, limited fruit and vegetables available, lots of fried food and meat… But actually (malaria aside) I think I was wrong to worry. A lot of ailments back home can be attributed to stress and so I actually feel much healthier here, where I’m not stressed about anything and I’m getting plenty of sleep; since I’ve been out here, for example, I haven’t had a single migraine. The warmth, the sun (when it’s not pelting down with torrential rain), and the joy and laughter of Nigerian people can’t help but make you feel happier and healthier.

I have to say, it makes me a little anxious about returning to the UK. With any luck, out here I’ll learn how to take things slower and not to invest so much emotional energy in my work. But is that even possible in the UK? In a culture where people go to work bleary-eyed and clutching a cup of caffeine, work 8, 10, 12 hour days and then check their blackberry several times that evening, what hope is there of taking things slower? When you’re trying to dress in ironed, sexy-yet-professional (and I’m quoting from Cosmopolitan here) Top Shop clothing and heels, work a 10 hour day making high-powered pitches and winning deals, come home and cook a Nigel Slater ‘quick supper’ for the family, spend an hour playing with the children and putting into practice Supernanny’s naughty-step-and-reward-chart routine and then finally reply to the many messages on Facebook which have accumulated since you were last in front of a computer screen 2 hours ago – where’s the opportunity for taking your foot off the pedal and just enjoying life?

I think we’re back to Maslow again. When you’ve basically got everything you could want, it’s not that you find things to moan about, but when you’re at the top of the pyramid, all you’re concerned about is self-fulfillment (or I think it’s called self-actualisation). You’ve got nowhere else to go, so you just stay there finding more and more ways in which you’re not fulfilled and trying to address them. Whereas, when you’re in sweltering heat and not sure where your next bucket of water is coming from, the range of things to worry about – whilst far more serious – is far narrower and you just focus your attention on finding that water.

Today

Today has been a much better day. I've walked along the railway and busy dusty roads, I've squished myself into the back of a bus, travelled through the busy market, made friends with a wannabe footballer called Kaz, shopped for vegetables at the side of the road and returned home to find a herd of cows on my road. Much more like it.

Fear

Yesterday, I came the closest I’ve come to throwing it all in and going home.

After a week of being in Abuja, of standards of living comparable to the UK, and of taking taxis everywhere, it was always going to be a shock to come back to Kaduna and to taking okadas. I felt a little unsafe on our ride into work (but then I always do – I never feel fully safe on those things), but then the journey home was something else.

For some reason, the main road had far more traffic than we’d ever seen at that time of day, and it was backed up a long way from one of the roundabouts. When okada drivers come to traffic jams (or ‘go slows’ as they’re known here), they try to find ways through them. Or around them. And if there isn’t a way, they invent one. So we found ourselves weaving in and out of tightly packed cars and buses, mounting curbs, humps and bumps to take muddy dirt tracks at the side of the road – onto the road, off the road, back onto the road, each time colliding with the driver and feeling like I was going to come off. Twice I had to slam my hand onto the bonnet of a vehicle – a 4x4 and a bus, both much larger than we were – which was trying to drive into us from the side.

That’s beyond my risk threshold, I’m afraid. I stopped the driver and got off – in the middle of what seemed like an industrial estate, and with no other prospects of getting home for a while since the roads were too crazy to catch a bus or bike and far too busy to consider walking alongside or crossing. After a bit of a walk along quiet side roads, we found a chop house (café) where we sat down for a drink. Weeping into my bitter lemon, I wondered how everyone else does it. Other volunteers seem happy enough to take okadas, or to take shared cars or buses along busy roads at alarming speeds; and Nigerians do it all the time! I’m finding it really hard to know that whatever I want to accomplish today, I’m going to have to take a potentially terrifying and dangerous journey to do it. And it’s exhausting to tense all your muscles and hold your breath for large portions of your commute because you’re worried you’re going to hit that car or come off the bike.

I know the answer to how Nigerians and other volunteers do it – they don’t worry as much as I do. And actually, in the case of many Nigerians, the answer seems to be that, since they believe that God will choose their time to die, they have no control over it and there’s therefore no need to worry about it. I have to say that’s becoming an ever more appealing philosophy. Although, it’s also the reason why no okada drivers wear helmets and presumably the cause of many deaths which could have been avoided.

Bedbugs and Boundaries

Each night, as I’ve been lying in bed going to sleep, I’ve heard a clicking sound. Like an insect or rodent was nibbling at something solid, or, maybe, like some larger insect was communicating with another of its kind. Since it started after Simon fixed the mirror so that it stood high enough to see our faces in, I had assumed that it was an insect – probably a large one like a cockroach – living in the piles of cardboard on which he’d stood the mirror.

Last night, the clicking was so loud that it woke me up. This morning, as I was getting dressed, I noticed a sizeable pile of what looked like sand at the foot of the bed. It turns out that the noise was, in fact, some sort of wood burrowing creature, eating its way through the foot of the bed. There are no holes like you’d expect with woodworm, but the outside of the wood is all cracked, like it’s pushing at it from the inside. Urgh. We have sprayed it with Rambo – strongest insecticide known to man, kills cockroaches which have merely walked through a patch of floor that was once sprayed. In fact, we sprayed so much that the air is still pretty toxic in there – we may end up sleeping on the sofas.

On an entirely different note, I’ve been thinking about boundaries. In the UK, I pride myself on maintaining strong boundaries between my personal and professional life. Here, however, that simply isn’t proving possible. For one thing, many of our colleagues working for the Funder are ex-pats – some are consultants – who are working away from their families. I imagine that for them, their entire life when they’re out here is work, so calling on a Sunday night to discuss meeting times in the upcoming week doesn’t seem odd. For the Nigerians we work with, there simply isn’t the distinction between the two worlds, I don’t think. Either that, or since home life is essentially family and home-based (most of our colleagues don’t seem to do much socialising), friends and colleagues become the same thing. Or perhaps it’s because we’re trying to make friends out here that I’m ignoring the boundary I would hold so strictly at home? Either way, I think I’m going to need a serious acclimatisation course when I return to work in the UK!

Luxureeeee!

This week we have escaped the diluvian streets of Kaduna for some Abuja luxury and a workshop at the funder’s Head Office.

We’re being put up in a very lovely hotel; our room has carpet (clean, fluffy carpet), a kettle, a functioning shower (hot), a bath with a plug that fits, and just a generally clean and extravagant feel. I didn’t expect that living in Nigeria would make me get gleefully excited at expensive hotel luxury – in fact, I expected that it would make me place less importance on mini-bars, flat screen TVs and room service and instead appreciate the simpler things in life – but I have to admit to being overwhelmingly happy to be here. It’s also fun to be with some other volunteers – we’ve met a great couple from California, and have finally been able to meet up with Lucy from the UK who we met on our VSO course back home and have been in touch with ever since.

I’m learning patience here. The last two days of the workshop have focused on financial management for schools. The facilitators have taken us through topics such as accountability & transparency, the importance of having more than one signatory on an account and how to fill in a bank deposit slip – all things with which I am very familiar. We have spent two days going through these principles (we have returned to most topics at least twice over the two days) and have had lengthy and heated arguments about certain issues, such as whether there should be two or three signatories and how to account for travel allowances. If I had seen the session plan, I would definitely have thought that the content could have been covered in half a day; but I’d have been wrong. For the majority of the people in the room, these weren’t everyday topics – these were brand new concepts. And as most schools here do not currently handle significant amounts of money (since none ever reaches them from local government) and do not follow many basic accounting principles, this will all be completely new to them too (it’s not difficult to see how corruption is entirely possible here.) It was obvious from discussions that it was very necessary to go over and over the topics, however frustrating it may have been for us. So sitting there is that room, reminding myself of these facts, I came one step closer to being a patient person.

I’m also learning that Nigerians see and talk about things very much in black and white terms (figuratively, I mean). Many of the Nigerians with whom I have worked and shared training are very keen to identify a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ answer in every situation. This, in my mind, is both a cause and a consequence of the situation described in a recent report on the educational system in five Nigerian states, which identified a lack of open questions being asked by teachers, and a distinct lack of opportunity for pupils to discuss or write in their own words. This workshop has also reminded me of Nigerians’ love for vociferous and heated discussion, and perhaps this too is linked to a passionate desire to arrive at the ‘right’ answers.

This black-and-white outlook seems to lead to a blame culture which is evident here. If there are only right and wrong answers with no grey area in between, compromise and agreeing to disagree don’t really come into it – someone is right, which means their opponent must be wrong and should get the blame. To my mind at least, this does not lend itself well to effective working relationships. And therein lies the challenge. I love it.

Marooned!

And now we are somewhat stranded. As the river level creeps ever upwards, and ever closer to our friends’ front door, our road has now started to flood – not just from the over-saturated swamp, but because the river is so high. When we went out earlier, the water was covering cars’ exhaust pipes in places and has risen since. The traffic has in fact increased along our street, because the next road down is now submerged in river, so when you’re not trying to avoid the puddles, you’re jumping out of the way of motorbikes. One man in his car, which had just very nearly run me over, shouted “White woman – what are you doing here?!”. I wasn’t sure whether he meant in front of his car, in a flooded area of town or in Nigeria, so I just kept walking.

The okadas continue to run down our road, with and without passengers. Passengers roll their trousers up and take off their shoes, and drivers hold their legs straight out in front of them to keep their feet wet whilst their wheels are submerged; it’s a miracle I haven’t yet witnessed anyone falling off into the water.

So we can’t get to the main road now. Not unless we’re prepared to wade in significant depths, and since someone told us they saw leeches in there, I’m not. We paddled to a riverside bar, where we sat above the swollen river and observed as the rapid currents dragged large tree parts pasts us, drank a couple of beers and watched a beautiful sunset. The river didn’t look like it was getting any higher, but by the time we came to cross that same patch of water to get home, it was considerably larger, deeper and faster-flowing and we had to wade almost up to our knees.

The volunteers who live next to the river are now two or three doors away from the encroaching Kaduna River, and have brought another couple of bags over to store in our – as yet – dry house. We met our landlord on the way out and he seemed ever so slightly less confident about the situation than before. Since we’re heading to Abuja for a week tomorrow – provided we can get someone to come and pick us up in a 4x4! – we’re piling everything on top of furniture and hoping for the best.

Water, water

Now it really is everywhere. This is proper rainy season. It’s kinda cool.

In the last few days, there has been at least one session per day of proper, heavy, tropical rain: the kind of rain that means you’re going to get wet if you even step into it for a second, and the chances of getting to work at all are minimal. The river has flooded. That’s the Kaduna River, only one street away from us. Today, our neighbours (two other volunteers) who live on the road right next to it came to let us know that we should go and take a look. Most of the road is covered, many houses are flooded and there was a Red Cross van there with an inflatable raft. For those who have been shipped (literally) out of their homes, it’s not kinda cool.

On our street, there’s one compound that’s flooded, and when it rains heavily, there’s a sort of swamp to the side of the road which saturates and overflows, turning the road into more of a river which we then have to wade through in our sandals. But our landlord very confidently told us today that, no matter that people down the road were packing up, the water wouldn’t reach us so we shouldn’t worry – and who am I to argue?

The volunteers who live on the river bank have left a couple of bags of stuff with us to stay dry, and we’re expecting them to come over at some point during the night to sleep if their place starts to flood. We have taken everything off the floor and out of bottom drawers and piled it high on our many sofas.

So in many ways, it’s not at all cool. But there’s still a definite air of excitement about the place. Several roadside shops were shut; they weren’t flooded, but I think the owners just wanted to join the groups of people standing around, looking at the flood and chatting – like normal life was suspended, a sort of Blitz spirit. And of course, because it’s Nigeria, there’s a lot of laughter and joking.

We attempted to go out to a bar tonight for beers and suya (barbecued meat), but halfway through eating, the sky turned a very ominous shade of black and we all dispersed sharpish (with half-finished beers. Sigh.). So here we are. Sitting in the dark, finishing off our suya and starting on a bottle of red wine. The thunder’s rumbling and the lightning flashes occasionally; the rain has died down a bit, but when it’s heavy the sound on our metal roof is amazing!

In other – still water-related – news, the plumber (to be properly Nigerian, pronounce every letter) came today and fixed our ever-running tap. He broke our sink in the process, but you can’t have everything in life.

Getting Angry

After yesterday’s post, I couldn’t have asked for a better illustration of what makes me angry here than the workshop Simon and I delivered today.

After a day of very active, participatory and resource-heavy activities which had taken a long time to plan and prepare and had seemed to work really well, Simon invited someone in the group to give us a closing prayer (every workshop begins and ends with prayer here). Instead of which, one of the group stood up and took centre stage to give Simon a lecture about how the per diem he had arranged for them was so insultingly small they had all discussed giving it back.

To put this into context, here are some of the facts about today’s workshop. It was held at the workplace of almost all of the participants, so that they would not incur additional travel or accommodation costs. Because the logistics of providing food for them were tricky, instead we gave them a daily allowance of 1,000 Naira. To give you an idea, 1,000 Naira is the VSO volunteer’s daily living allowance (outside of accommodation); this is what volunteers live off on a daily basis. Last night we went to a normal ‘chop house’ (local restaurant, full of local Nigerians) and got four evening meals including soft drinks for a total of N1,600.

Talking to our colleague afterwards, we asked how N1,000 could possibly not be enough for the participants to buy their refreshments for the day. He explained that it has to do with status, and that people of this stature are insulted that it’s being suggested they eat so cheaply.

There was also outrage about how undignified it was that Simon had told them about this allowance in advance of the workshop as part of a text containing all details of the session. Since some of them do not have access to email and since it seemed that lots of professional communication was done via text, it didn’t seem like an unreasonable thing to do. Apparently, it’s not the fact that details were communicated by text that has offended them, but the fact that the amount being offered as an allowance was specifically named in this text.

So there are cultural differences we’re yet to understand, and we have learnt a big lesson today about running everything by a Nigerian colleague before taking action in case there are hidden faux pas. But I’m not sure whether something being an aspect of local culture means I can’t find it unacceptable. This per diem culture – which, it seems, we are only seeing the tip of: apparently civil servants here would expect a daily allowance of N15,000 to attend a training day – is found everywhere, and not just in the development sector. To me it just seems the wrong way round. What value can people possibly see in the actual training if they’re being paid – over and above their salary – to attend it? How on earth do Nigerians react when they move to the UK and suddenly discover that training is actually something you have to pay for, rather than be paid for?

In the ‘development context’ – as VSO likes to say – I can see that you can’t expect people to immediately see the value in what you’re trying to achieve (and certainly I’m not saying I’m expecting gratitude). I can see that, at a community level, it makes perfect sense to me that you would provide food at a community meeting, knowing full well that the food (rather than the agenda) would be the incentive for most attendees, but hoping to achieve something with them while they are eating. Why should it be any different at government level? I suspect that it is this very development work which has created this per diem culture – you start by providing rice at a community forum, and it escalates to persuading government ministers that the education programme is relevant by paying for a day of their time. I can’t see how it’s sustainable.

It also makes me wonder – are there no private training businesses in Nigeria? Is it only development agencies with enormous budgets who provide training and therefore per diems? There probably are training businesses here, or more likely leadership gurus who deliver conferences. Book shop shelves are full of business and leadership guides, and there is a very entrepreneurial spirit here, so I imagine it’s the self-employed self-starters who are willing to actually pay for developing their skills and knowledge.

All of that said, I understand that this is the culture I’ve chosen to come and work in and with; and you can’t change anything by stepping outside of people’s culture and all that brings with it. That doesn’t necessarily stop me being angry about it.

Footnote: I should say that Simon and I are paid incredibly handsome per diems by the funder when we travel to workshops like this, which we had been using to supplement our volunteer allowance. I am now reconsidering what I should do with this money.

Work culture

The VSO strapline is Sharing Skills, Changing Lives; we volunteers enjoy creating alternatives to fit our own experiences. One of my fellow volunteers is frustrated that all she feels she can share with her colleagues is how to perform certain computer functions without using the mouse; or Sharing Shortcuts, Changing Lives. Another of my favourites is Sharing lunch, Changing Waistlines. My own variation of the moment is Getting Angry, Changing Nothing. It’s been a frustrating week.

I think it’s fair to say that, in general, Nigerian timekeeping is very different from our own. Of course it’s a generalization to say that people here always arrive much later than the time agreed, but it’s one that Nigerians recognize. I think this trait fits with the happier, more relaxed view of the world, in which people can be without the staples of a Western lifestyle (power, water, wealth) and yet laugh all the time.

Planning, too, is far less evident, far less formalized, far less systematic than I am used to. Again, I can rationalize it. If your life expectancy is 45, why would you constantly think of tomorrow? We’re a long way from the pension debates of the UK: provision for life after retirement just isn’t an issue for most people here. There’s little foresight, little thought given to long-term implications. It’s seen as strange that we should want to book one of the office drivers to take us for a three-day work trip any more than 2 days in advance. There are whiteboards in the offices with dates on, but activities seem mainly to be entered retrospectively. I haven’t seen anyone in one of the organizations we work in with a diary (and they don’t have computers either); it simply isn’t done to arrange a specific time and date for a meeting – instead, you wander round the site, hoping to find them in their office and with fewer than 5 people in the queue to see them. (Incidentally, though there are no diaries, most people’s offices contain at least 3 calendars; they’re almost always for past years.)

And yet, as another volunteer put it, everything seems to work; things seem to come together in a “haphazard, happy and effective way” in the end. Which, I have to admit, is infuriating to me. It does not help to convince people that planning is essential, when things seem to work out with or without it. Am I, paradoxically, here to learn that planning is, after all, not essential? That all of that stuff I’ve learnt on training courses about ‘Fail to plan, plan to fail’ and ‘Prior planning and preparation prevents poor performance’ is nonsense? I’d like to think I’m open to this possibility (although it’s not in my nature to do anything other than plan and make spreadsheets), and I can certainly see that it’s true – things do seem to work out here, and without the, seemingly unnecessary, stress and panic which a serial planner would go through. But I can’t help thinking that things would be so much better if the planning were there. If Nigerian people can achieve so much with this haphazard approach, think how much they could achieve with some planning and structure! And – is it too simplistic to say it? – if it worked so well, would Nigeria still be a developing country?

Clearly, imposing my UK-based idea of planning, project management, systems etc onto Nigerian culture wouldn’t work. But I’m struggling to know where the line should come between cultural acceptance and holding onto what you believe to be the best way forward. To what extent should I accept that the Nigerian way is to be flexible about what time a workshop starts, to invite people to meetings with less than 24 hours’ notice, to assume that things will work out and that a driver will be free if you need one? And to what extent should I hold onto my standards from home, where I wouldn’t accept anything less than a three month workplan in Excel, where meetings are chaired to within a minute of the agenda timings, and where people have synced electronic calendars I can have access to? My fear is that I will either end up trying to impose a structured system in my work here, which simply won’t work with this culture, or that I will go home with significantly lower standards in my professional life. At the moment, I’m just Getting Angry and Changing Nothing, which isn’t very satisfying; but when did anything change without someone getting angry about it?

Potograps

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=230607&id=506605378&l=4e447b865e

Week Eight, and I think I've finally figured out how to share photos. Use the link above and, I'm reliably informed, you will be able to see a selection of my photos so far. Quite a large selection - feel free to pick and choose; there will be no exam. (As an aside, native Hausa speakers who learn English often have difficulty distinguishing between 'f' and 'p' sounds, and similarly between 'v' and 'b'. So, children in a class might be told to 'stand uff so that the putograpper can take a potograp'. Hofe you enjoy my potograps.)

Spent last week travelling around in the south of Kaduna state, visiting the LGEAs (education authorities) and community-based charities who are delivering training to the School Based Management Committees (kind of like a board of governors, made up of representatives of the local community - still very new and needing a lot of support to make them functional). The last section of the photo album is of this trip. In a nutshell: there was lots of rain, we successfully made one particularly hairy journey up and over a rocky hill, I ate a lot of Nigerian food (so far, I'm not its biggest fan, but there's still time) and overall spent a thoroughly enjoyable 5 days with two of my colleagues. Also, I managed to watch all of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves on the TV in my hotel room (who remembered that the cast includes Sean Connery and Brian Blessed?!); shouldn't have been the highlight, but probably was.