Welcome to another episode of “Holy Shit, I’m Living in Africa.” In today’s installment, I move out of my transitional accommodation and into my permanent housing solution.

When I first arrived, I got to stay within the main house of the Fantsuam Foundation compound. It wasn’t much: small room, living out of my suitcase, tiny bathroom with no running water. But there was a luxurious living room, overhead fans, and a housekeeper who prepared meals and generally kept the house.

Last night, the usual occupants of the house returned from their travels, so I decided it was time to take the great leap… about 20km down the road, to the village of Kagoro. My new house has 3 bedrooms, and other volunteers will be joining me… eventually… probably.

The house is not spectacular. It is in fact a “hovel.” But I’m living in a developing country, and this is actually pretty decent by rural Nigerian standards, and I’m not particularly surprised. It’s quite spacious, because it’s meant to hold 3 volunteers. And the living room is again pretty decent, with, like, chairs and things. But the floor is dirty (and in the bathrooms, flat-out disgusting), the kitchen consists of a table and a sink, and there is no furniture anywhere to store anything inside. Running water and power are intermittent at best.

On the other hand, Kagoro is a pretty nice place. I have to commute everyday to Kafanchan, but it’s not like I personally have to do any driving, you know? The population is much less than Kaf, and the surroundings are gorgeous — I’m living at the foot of a mountain. And it’s quieter. And by quieter, I mean that the night is not filled with an orchestra of catastrophic nightmare sounds like it was in Kaf.

In Kaf, I would go to sleep, and wake up at around 4am while some preacher dude with a set of speakers wailed some morning prayers extremely loudly — and these were not just morning prayers, but incredibly annoying morning prayers, that sounded something like:

YARRRRRBUGAGENOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAHAMSUAM! (x16)

That’s what it was like at first, anyway. As time wore on, this voice was eventually joined by two or three others, independently doing the same thing at approximately the same time, but slightly staggered, thus creating a surreal choral effect. After they had done this, of course, all the animals in the town would be awake. There are scads of animals here, but the purposes of this exposition only the chickens and the dogs matter. Do you know what it sounds like when hundreds of dogs and roosters simultaneously wake up and starting shouting? It sounds like the fucking apocalypse, complete with a nightmare army of three-headed snake demons coming to eat your brains.

These things do not happen in Kagoro. Plus, I hear they have a *killer* New Year’s Festival.

Advantage: Fono.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 6:41 am and is filed under Nigeria. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.