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!