Havoc and Happiness

They’re rebuilding the wall.  And in the spirit of omelette making and obligatory egg cracking, it seems there needs to be a whole lot more destruction and chaos before it can be rebuilt. Our compound is full of rubble, sand, broken wall and plants that have been pulled up and either thrown onto a pile or – and this actually shocked me a little – re-planted into pretty faux terracotta pots.

I just walked outside to sit on our porch and noticed that there is a water pipe – which used to connect to the outside tap in the wall and is now exposed – leaking constantly and steadily. And my first thought wasn’t “What a waste” or “That’s annoying – I wonder how long that will be left like that”, but instead I thought “How nice – it’s like we’ve got a water feature!”. I think the Nigerian eternal optimism is rubbing off on me.

I’ve realised, through living out here, that everything’s perception. When things go wrong – and they almost always do – you can either get angry about it, or go with the flow. When there’s no NEPA, you can either seethe about the lack of light and the noise from other people’s generators, or you can revel in having to live more simply and romantically by candlelight. And when your husband has to travel for work for a couple of weeks, you can either feel sad and lonely, or enjoy the fact that you will have the house to yourself to listen to the Glee soundtrack and paint your nails.

Obviously, to change one’s perception is easier said than done. And actually, I’m not sure this romanticised view of the world is the foundation of Nigerian optimism. I don’t’ find Nigerians, in general, to be very romantic people. I think it’s simply not in the culture to get angry about things like meetings starting late or NEPA suddenly disappearing. It’s like the whole noise thing: while we oyibos (white people) get increasingly annoyed by the sound of generators or music blaring out from a neighbour’s house, our Nigerian friends don’t even seem to hear it – it’s like it doesn’t register with them at all, and they just carry on as if it’s not there.

Despite the difficult conditions here, every Nigerian is convinced that he’s going to become a millionaire with every new venture he starts. In general, people are constantly looking for opportunities to better their lives, to bring in more money for their family, to move up in the world – and they are optimistic that they will achieve this. Recently I heard a Nigerian explain the more secular society of Britain by the fact that we in the UK have less to be hopeful about. It took me a while to deconstruct that sentence, but I don’t think he meant that our future is any less bright than Nigeria’s; instead, he meant that we already have so much going for us that our list of things left to hope for is so much smaller, and therefore we don’t need prayer in the same way that Nigerians do.

Whatever it is, international surveys would have us believe that Nigerians are the happiest people on the planet, and there is certainly a great deal of laughter here, so they must be onto something.