Chapter III - Return to Nigeria
Continuing on the book about my travels, after having been stalled for at least six months on the finer details of some things in Chapter II pertaining to events that took place in 1876, I wrote Chapter III in almost its entirity last Sunday. It pertains to my second project in Nigeria. I've tweaked it a bit in the ensuing week and now its ready to share!
( This is the immediately preceding section).
Pictures provided here because why not, though they wouldn't necessarily accompany the text in book form (though I really wouldn't mind breaking with text-only tradition and inserting some photos if possible)
Sunday, April 8th, 2012 - “Hi! It’s good to be back, how is everyone?” I greet the Organization’s staff in their headquarters office in Abuja, Nigeria. Outside lightning flickers and thunder rumbles. I notice John, the “program assistant” who is around my age, looking very glum.
“John was robbed in Lagos yesterday” Mike, the country director, informs me.
“Oh no, what happened?” I turn to John
“I was in Lagos to pick up my fiancee from the airport -she’d been in France- and armed men came into the hotel and robbed everyone”
“Armed with guns?? They overran the whole hotel?”
“Yeah they went from room to room and robbed everyone of everything. They got my laptop, everything”
“Will the police do anything?”
“Well they arrested the entire hotel staff”
Welcome back to Nigeria. After we’ve covered this topic I turn to Mike
“I heard another bomb went off in Kaduna today, is your family safe?”
“Yes I’ve moved them to Abuja, it’s safer here.”
Back at my hotel I greet my friends Anthony the security guard and Adaeze the resident princess, they are both exactly where I left them, standing on the second floor landing and selling Dubaian real estate in the lobby, respectively.
On Monday the weather is better, and Mike takes me sightseeing around the city with his family. There are some nice parks. On Tuesday Blessing, the driver, drives me three hours east of Abuja, along a highway that winds among low escarpments of red dirt and green foliage to the town of Lafia in Nasarawa province. For this project I will only be accompanied b Blessing.
After John’s recent experience in Lagos, I’m happy to note the presence of an AK-toting security guard at the entrance to the hotel - a two story building, freshly painted in a cheery yellow, with elegant white columns supporting balconies and veranda roofs. In the back there is even a nice pool. It takes some fiddling with the key to get my room’s door open, but the room seems alright. I try to check in with the world on the internet but the connection keeps going down. I take a shower and note there’s no hot water, though the ambient temperature is hot enough that this isn’t terrible suffering. The fridge seems to occasionally make a banging noise just when one least expects it.
I go to go downstairs but can’t manage to lock the door until I finally have to get a member of the hotel staff to expertly finagle the wonky key. Back in my room after dinner, trying to read A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, I find the fridge continues to make its unexpected banging about once every 45 minutes… until, fed up, I unplug it.
The power goes out, and with it the lights and air conditioning, and it’s stifling. I go down and swim leisurely laps, doing the backstroke while gazing up at the starry night above me and the flickering of lightning on the horizon on all sides. This is wonderful. [I'm not perfectly happy with the "This is wonderful," I'm trying to think of the right concise phrase that onveys that despite the discomforts I am genuinely happy at the moment described. Suggestions welcome]
April 11th, Day 4 - It’s a two hour drive from Lafia town to the project site, through lush woodland interspersed with villages of huts. The project site is a YMCA training facility with a serenely quiet and peaceful atmosphere. There are various training plots for different kinds of crops and fish farming ponds with a weed-encrusted faded-yellow excavator perched on the edge of one. Bees buzz in and out of the vent grating of its engine compartment. There are also some topbar beehives, but the training facility only has one bee suit and no smokers or gloves. Okay first order of business, let’s talk about how we can make this missing equipment.
Every evening Blessing and I go to a small restaurant a short distance from the hotel for dinner. In this area dinner usually consists of some chewy meat in spicy rice.
There’s a television mounted to the wall showing a news program. The program shows about a dozen Iranians who are all in favor of Iran’s nuclear program and opposed to the sanctions the US is currently proposing against Iran. Then there’s a lengthy bit headlined “the United (Police) State” about how the Department of Homeland Security recently purchased four hundred and fifty million rounds of hollowpoint ammunition, as footage of American riot police looking dystopian breaking up protests in their tactical gear is occasionally punctuated by footage of watermelons being exploded by hollowpoint bullets.
There’s a short bit entitled “revolution in Bahrain” as I scrape my plate clean, and it’s back to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan shaking the Iranian president’s hand and looking like they’re chums. Is this what the world looks like from a non-American perspective? I take note of the program’s name, “PressTV” to look it up later.
Returning to my room, I find that though I thought I had locked my door it hadn’t quite locked. Nothing is amiss but i find it disconcerting not to be able to trust my door lock.
The internet appears to be working so I google PressTV and find it is an Iranian state owned station. A DJ has set up some speakers just outside my window and blasts party music so loudly I can hardly think, but I google further and find there has been no revolution in Bahrain at all, Iran just apparently wants to discredit the government of Bahrain, some inter state spat that’s beyond me. With propaganda like this on TV, no wonder there’s anti-western fanatics in Nigeria. This music is about to make me some kind of crazed fanatic myself.
Around midnight, sweltering in my room and trying unsuccessfully to sleep I look out the window and see that there is not a single person out there to listen to the blasting music.
April 12th, Day 5 - For this project we are for the most part visiting different beekeeping groups in this state for a day or two each. On this day we have driven three hours visit a group of beekeepers to the north. There’s fifteen beekeepers from around this village, and between them they have dozens of hives, one bee suit, and one smoker. We walk around the area looking at their hives, which are mostly hollow logs hanging in trees. As we walk around the rocky forests around the village, I finish my water bottle and hide it in my backpack. I’ve figured out the local trash management solution would be to casually toss it aside.
In the distance, a few kilometers away is an immense wall of stone, the side of the Jos Plateau, marked by a thin white ribbon plummeting from the top to the bottom, presumably- disappearing behind trees from our vantage point anyway. This is Farin Ruwa Falls, at 150 meters, the tallest waterfall in Nigeria.
“Can we go see the waterfall when we’re done here?” I ask Blessing. He makes a face
“It’s not in the scope, and we don’t have enough foil”
“Foil?” I ask, confused
“Foil for the car”
“Um,” I venture hesitantly, baffled, “why do we need foil for the car?”
“It was a long drive here, we won’t have enough foil if we go all the way to the falls and return to Lafia”
“Oh, FUEL. Surely we can buy some on the way back, I’ll pay the added fuel cost”
“There’s nothing to see there anyway, and the road is very bad” he says dismissively. I can see I won’t win this.
Back at the hotel I hide the empty water bottle with the others I’ve accumulated in a desk drawer. There is no trash can because housekeeping will just chuck any trash they find out the window to join the plastic waste billowing in the wind and sticking to the bushes out there. I know hiding my trash is just delaying the inevitable but I can’t help but become a neurotic trash hoarder procrastinating this unecological outcome.
April 13th, Day 6 - "The hotel didn't have any tea, so I went out to the street and got you some tea bags, sugar and pigs milk" Blessing tells me helpfully one morning.
"Pigs milk?? I don't think I've ever had pig’s milk before!"
"You haven't had pig milk? You haven't been putting the milk in your tea back at the hotel?"
"I don't usually put milk in my tea, but if I knew it was pig milk I might have tried it!"
"In the United States they don't put pig milk in tea???"
"No they put cow's milk in tea, I didn't even know you could milk a pig!"
Blessing looks baffled for a moment.
"Oh. Not PIG, PIG. PIG." He says as if he’s distinguishing between two different words. Finally he points to the sachet of powdered milk, and I realize it says peak on it, which presumably is a grade of milk here.
It turns out most nights the DJ is blasting his music just outside my window. Between that, paranoia about my lock not working, and neurosis over the lack of trash disposal I feel I am losing my mind.
BApril 14th, Day 7 - Rows of yam mounds and mud-walled little houses fly past us as we speed along the narrow dirt trail. Our little convoy of four motorbikes, each with a driver and passenger, occasionally slows to go around skinny white cows with their huge horns. Farmers look up from maintaining their red-brown yam mounds and wave as we go past. Women in brightly-colored dresses, with loads upon their head bound for market, stand aside in the dappled shade as we pass, and give us friendly smiles. If Nigeria could be boiled down to an abstract general impression, this would be it - rows and rows of yam mounds made of red mud, the verdant green trees, and smiles under astonishing loads carried on heads.
After about twenty minutes the land around us rises into mountainous hills, and the yam fields give way to rocks and scraggly trees. Up and up we go, at times having to get off the motorbikes and walk up particularly steep or treacherous parts of the trail. About two hours later we reach our destination: the remote village of Ogbagi. First reached by motorbike only six months earlier. Despite this isolation all the village houses (small, rectangular, mud-walled) have corrugated metal roofs, which presumably were carried up the mountain on people’s heads.
The village’s beekeeper/farmers gather together under a large mango tree. Most farmers in the village maintain a few traditional (hollowed-out log) hives high up in trees, as well as practice “honey hunting.” Over the next two hours I explain the benefits of removable-comb topbar hives and how to make them, and answer questions about bee biology and behavior. Then it’s time to inspect a hive.
They only ever open hives at night, so the villagers are amused and curious when I propose opening a hive during the day. My purpose in doing the inspection is more to show it’s possible than anything else. When I put my protective coveralls on, I’m pretty sure one of the young men is laughing at me. They gather around about thirty feet away as I approach the little granary hut that has a beehive in it.
I’ve been given a smoking bundle of reeds as a smoker. Unfortunately with no way to blow smoke into the hive with that, when I open the door of the hut the bees become angry before I can adequately smoke them. The crowd runs.
I have a good suit and these bees aren’t nearly as bad as the rabid hybrid Africanized bees I’m accustomed to in California, so I calmly carry on inspecting the colony. Without removable frames, all I can really determine is that there is a lot of uncapped honey. I close it up and walk to a nearby clearing where I walk in circles for awhile to lose the pursuing bees. Blessing comes within shouting distance and shouts at me to light the surrounding brush on fire, presumably to create mass smoke to lose the bees. The urge to make a ridiculous fiasco like that out of a normal bee inspection is exactly what I’m here to steer them away from. I pace around for five minutes, remove my suit, and rejoin the group.
April 15th, Day 8 - They are blasting the music down by the pool outside my window again. I try to skype with Terragon but even with the windows closed I almost can’t hear her over the blasting music.
“When my contract on this boat ends I’m thinking [drowned out by music]”
“What?”
“When I’m done on Eos… [deafening music] …East Coast”
“What I’m sorry I can barely hear you over this music”
“[overpowering music] …contract on the schooner Pegasus”
As far as I’m able to discern, she’ll be finishing her contract sailing on the brigantine EosI soon and taking up a contract on the schooner Pegasus on the East Coast. I am coming to understand very well why they sometimes play loud music as a form of psychological warfare.
April 19th, Day 12 - The project ended yesterday, I’m supposed to have two days to rest and write the reports, return to Abuja on Saturday, and fly to Ethiopia on Monday. I write the reports in half an hour, swim some laps, and finish reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Between the Woods and the Water (having finished A Time of Gifts a few days earlier). These two books recount a journey on foot across Europe in 1934. I love his beautiful descriptions of the places he’s traveled and people he’s met, they are precise, specific, and full of awareness of the context of the moment in time. I would love to be able to write something like that some day. There’s a third book about this journey, but I’ve had trouble finding it.
I have no more books, the internet has been down for days, and I don’t feel safe wandering around town by myself. I try asking Blessing if we can return to Abuja early but no “it’s not safe, Boko Haram is threatening to blow up hotels there now” and of course going anywhere else is “not in the scope” - he seems to be having the time of his life holed up in his hotel room watching TV all day. Personally TV makes me feel like my brain is rotting.
April 20th, Day 13 - There’s two other volunteers in Lafia whom I’ve met, Yuan a Chinese Canadian and Ali a Sri Lankan. They are with a different organization but I’d been introduced to them because we are possibly the only foreigners in town and they’ve also been working with the YMCA. They stop by and say they’re going to the YMCA training site, where they’ll spend the night. There’s ample rooms in the guest house there if I want to come along. The vision of this peaceful place of pleasant breezes and serenity sounds worlds better than this stifling hotel so I quickly go to Blessing’s room and knock on the door.
“That will cost a lot of foil and it’s not in the scope” he says stubbornly after I’ve explained.
“Yuan and Ali are already going so I’ll just go with them”
“They’re taking public transit, it’s against our policy for you to ride public transit”
I return to my room and try to watch TV. After an hour I can’t stand it any more and call Mike, the country director in Abuja. I beg him to please get me back to Abuja, which he agrees to do. Minutes later Blessing throws open my door and peremptorily demands “are you packed??”
