Moving House

A few weeks ago, when I got sick for the millionth time over here, we decided we couldn’t just keep going like that: I had to put my health first, and another four months of being ill every two weeks wasn’t going to leave my body in a great state when I got back to the UK. So we agreed to monitor my health for the month of August: if I managed to stay well for those few weeks, we would carry on, stay until the end of our placement in December; if I continued to come down with something every couple of weeks, we would cut our placements short.

When we spoke to our partner organisations about this, the funder came back to us to ask whether we thought a change of environment might help to improve my health, and they offered us a move to their guest house compound in the north of Kaduna. It was a genuinely difficult decision: although the guest house offers considerably more comfort (air conditioning, a generator, constant running water, a television, swimming pool etc), we have grown to love our life in Kigo Road. To leave our neighbours, the children who come in to play every day, the community of people who greet us on our way home from work, the bars which have become our locals, the friendly couple and their baby who run the little shop across the road and order in diet pepsi especially for me… The guest house is more isolated, in a richer area of the city with fewer little corner shops, and offers a more ex-pat style of life – not the life volunteers generally want, and not what we had come here to experience.

In the end, we decided it would be churlish not to accept this generous offer: living in the guest house affords me the greatest chance of being able to stick around until the end of my placement, which is the most important thing (I really don’t want to leave Nigeria at all, let alone early!), and I didn’t want to end up in a situation where I got sick again and had to explain to my colleagues that I was going home without having given this a shot.

So, with Simon out of town for work, I spent most of Thursday and Friday packing up our home. Although we’ve managed to acquire quite a bit over here, we really don’t have that much stuff, but somehow it was still a huge job to pack it all and I was totally exhausted by the time Simon arrived home to find a pile of packed bags and boxes on Friday evening. But no time to rest – we’d promised some other volunteers that we would show them a bar which they hadn’t been to yet (the Rugby Club), so off we went for beer and some dinner. Somehow, we ended up back on Kigo Road and in a nightclub.

The next morning was not pretty. In a fug of hangover, I somehow managed to help with the packing of the truck. And then, with a goodbye to the kids from next door and our neighbour Tony, we were off – Simon and I crammed into the front passenger seat together, clutching a sculpture of a Yoruba goddess and a bottle of vodka with an ill-fitting cap (our two most delicate possessions) and hoping I wouldn’t vomit before we arrived.

Anyway, the move went fine in the end – nothing broken, no vomit – and now we’re in the new place. It’s very nice: patio doors opening out onto the swimming pool, a television with satellite channels, a spiral staircase up to a mezzanine bedroom level with an en suite bathroom. On the other hand, the electrics are highly dodgy. One socket in the kitchen is blackened and has obviously, at some point, been on fire. On our first night, the air conditioning unit upstairs stopped working and when I went to investigate, I found that the plug had started to melt and the socket was very hot and turning black: so that doesn’t work now. When the second air con unit didn’t seem to be having much effect, I went to check out why it wasn’t working properly and I found that it was plugged into the only working socket in the kitchen. However, as well as powering this unit, a multi-socket extension lead (powering the fridge, kettle etc) is connected by wires round the back of the actual socket (which has been pulled slightly away form the wall), and a second ad hoc socket had also been connected by wires round the back of the main socket fitting, into which was plugged the microwave. None of this seems very safe. So we’re having to turn everything off, including the fridge, when we go to bed, for fear of a fire while we’re sleeping.

There are things to get used to – new things that don’t work, things which didn’t used to work in our old home which we now have access to. We even have access to a washing machine, but trying to figure out how to get it to work when the NEPA was going off every 30 minutes or so was a challenge which kept Simon busy more or less all day yesterday! I think we’ll be sticking to handwashing. We still have to work out where our local shop is, and finding a local bar is going to be challenging in this richer, predominantly Muslim area.

Oh, and we have been visited twice by a large lizard which, somehow manages to get itself inside even when all the doors are closed, and then flip flops around frantically at the patio doors, trying to get out. The second time, I tried to let it out, but it ran back into the house and under the sofa. It has never come out and doesn’t seem to be stuck anywhere inside – a mystery.