I'm David Fono, and I'm a pervasive gaming consultant. That means I develop unconventional games that surround people and bring them together. I am also quite handy with the internet. More!
The morning starts with a lot of loud sounds at around 5:30. The area is saturated with roosters, which are very effective alarms, and with mosques that have attached loudspeakers to their roofs. I get up around an hour later and I heat a pot of water using my kerosene stove. Bathing is accomplished by way of a bucket, a bowl, and a hole in the ground. Generally there’s enough time for a couple of slices of bread and coffee before the driver arrives to take me to work. A driver is necessary because work is in the neighbouring village, about 20km away.
So I get in at about 8am, which is when the workday technically starts. In theory. In reality, there’s a lot of socializing as everyone filters in over the next half hour. There’s about 40 staff in a compound which is not terribly large, so things get very friendly around here. Typically, first thing in the morning there’s a meeting – about the wireless ISP project, or schools – which is somewhat hampered by the fact that everyone is late to it.
Figuring out what to do with my day is always an incredibly interesting task. There’s about a million things I could do – I could work on preparing one of several IT trainings, I could work on the school marketing plan, or the microfinance MIS, or the wireless ISP marketing material. It’s difficult to prioritize because everything is sufficiently challenging that I get exhausted working on any one thing at a time. So I sort of grapple with indecision until lunch. In times gone by, a lunch lady would come to the front of the compound, and I’d buy rice, beans or pounded yam (50 naira), plus a mineral (30 naira), and I’d sit around and eat in the shade with my colleagues. These days, there’s no lunch lady, and I generally wander down the street for fried sweet potatoes or boiled eggs or something to that effect.
After work, I’ll usually spend a little bit of time hanging out with my friends at work, and we’ll go to a bar for a while. Beer is amazingly cheap in Nigeria, and the alcohol content is unregulated, and when you combine those you spell “fun.” Also the beer is occasionally somewhat cold. Other times, I hit the market to buy ingredients for dinner. I live almost entirely on various combinations of tomatoes, onions, hot peppers, rice, beans, cabbage, potatoes, bread, and instant noodles. Once in a while I’ll get some overwhelmingly luxurious good like a pineapple. When I get a pineapple it’s like the best day of the week. There are one or two stores where you can buy imported goods like chocolate chip cookies, but for some reasons, all those sorts of things are basically awful here.
Then I go down the road – or I’ll take a (motor)bike, which is a horrifyingly bad idea, but one gets desensitized to the sensation of imminent death after a while – to where the cars wait to take people to the town where my house is. Public transit is certainly of the highlights of rural Nigeria. The cars are heaps of rubble, held together with strings and wires, packed with a number of passengers which I’m relatively sure exceeds the manufacturer’s intended capacity. Sometimes you’ll sit in someone’s lap, or they’ll sit in yours. It is essentially awesome.
When I get out of the car, I walk through a bit of a bush, across train tracks, and onto the dirt road to my house. I trade short greetings with the people I walk by, of which there are plenty, and more elongated greetings with the people I know, of which there are a few. About halfway down the road the neighbourhood children spot me and they descend upon me like a thunderstorm. The children travel in packs here, like wolves. They clasp onto my hands and feet with razor-like talons, threatening to drag me down, down, down. Their smiling, laughing faces hide their murderous intent. Luckily they are very small and they lose interest after a few minutes.
Children aside, all the neighbours are incredibly nice. They offer me palm wine and they attempt to teach me Hausa. I’ve only encountered hostility once, but I’m pretty sure the guy was drunk. And even when people are drunk here, they’re usually even more nice than usual, so I’m pretty sure the guy was also just a jerk. All the niceness can get a bit tiring after a while, though. When you’re in a good mood, it’s great to walk outside and find yourself in what is essentially a never-ending, town-wide party. But when you’re in a bad mood, going around the corner to buy some eggs is like walking a gauntlet.
My house is big and pink, and usually pretty dirty, and usually not full of immediately edible foods, so a lot of the evening gets taken up with cleaning and cooking. It’s generally dark by the time dinner is ready, which means there’s just enough time afterward to read a little, have a tea, and go to bed. Then I’ll have a dream about neutron bombs or rabbits, and it’s time to start again.
A few other things to note for those coming to Kafanchan, in no particular order: Don’t get sick, because the hospital is scary. On the other hand, if you can self-diagnose, then you can buy drugs on the cheap without a prescription. Hand-washing your laundry in the hot, beating sun is kind of fun at first, but eventually you’ll be glad you can pay a lady N300/week to do it for you. Please remember to wash your hands frequently. There is garbage on the ground everywhere, but you get used to it. Digestive biscuits are cheap and plentiful. Most of the barbecued meat you can buy on the roadside is delicious, and probably does not contain horrible diseases.
It’s dark, but the darkness is softened by the light of a wavering candle in the corner. When you’re frequently threatened by total blackness, you begin to realize just how much illumination a candle has to offer. We’re sitting — squatting, really — on wooden benches in a small boxy hut constructed from thatched palm leaves. We can see each other, a little, enough. The flickering orange glow casts our features into a ghostly, syrupy relief. It’s a scene with the vividness of a dream, and the palm wine contributes rather successfully to that effect.
Palm wine is to palm trees as maple syrup is to maple trees. Not the palm trees you find in California; it’s a different species. Unlike maple syrup, though, palm wine is alcoholic as soon as it comes out of the tree. Basically it’s a miracle of nature. The substance is a kind of milky juice, a bit sweet, a bit sour, a bit bubbly. Nigerians, as you can probably tell, are quite adept at harnessing the incarnate power of the palm tree. The sap is a popular libation, the leaves a building material, and palm oil is extracted from the fruit.
“We” consists of myself and Hiromi, and John, and Matthew, and Alex. John is an older gentlemen, and his wife is our palm wine dealer (she also deals in stiffer, more dubious beverages.) I’ve talked about him before, but it bears repeating: he used to be a Scout leader, as well as an artist who studied in Glasgow, and he was trained as a soldier in Israel before fighting in the Nigerian Civil War. He is currently a police sergeant and a schoolteacher. Early today he came to our house for dinner, which was spaghetti. Matthew is a new acquaintance. He’s a middle-aged guy, and apparently he knows our employer at Fantsuam Foundation. Through that connection he set up a computer centre in Kagoro a number of years ago, although he is currently a teacher as well. Alex is a younger dude who we’ve met briefly before, although it’s been a while since we ran into one another and I can’t recognize him in the low light. I’m about to have one of those embarrassing moments when someone I don’t remember asks me if I remember them.
“What is wrong with Nigeria?” wonders Matthew. It’s not a challenge; it’s not a denial; it’s a rhetorical question.
“We really appreciate what you’re doing,” continues Matthew, addressing myself and Hiromi. “You’ve sacrificed a lot to come out here and help us. People need to understand this.”
“People need to do their best,” suggests John.
Matthew grows emphatic. “People are lazy! If you want to improve your life then you can do it by taking responsibility and working hard. A boy down the street I know, he just learned to repair GSM handsets. That’s what people can do.”
“But the young men around here just spend their time doing nothing,” says John, completing the thought.
“I brought two computers to this town, with my own hands,” Matthew declares proudly, and angrily. He’s punching his words, intoxicated with passion and palm wine. “Two computers, for free. We brought them to the chief’s palace, and he gave us his blessing, and they gave us the reading room to put them in. Now there’s a media centre.”
There’s a contemplative pause, which often occurs in these sorts of conversations. Matthew continues.
“Developing countries all over, they’re learning. India! Look at India, India can do it. Look at their computers.”
“Malaysia,” adds John.
“Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan…”
“Germany,” contributes Alex.
“Germany?! Germany!” Matthew is incredulous. “Shut up! Germany is a world power! Germany, France, USA… China, maybe Canada. Germany!?? Shut up! Germany is where Hitler came from.”
“Didn’t Hitler come from France?” asks John.
“That was Napolean.”
“Ah right. Napolean Bonaparte.”
Matthew can’t quite get over it. “Germany!” he exclaims.
Katie came and Katie went, and I could blog all sorts of ways about it, but why expend the tremendous effort when she has already done it for me? SHAZAM!
Also, she took some really nice photos, which document my experience in a way which I, as the experiencer, am incapable of doing. KERPOW!
Also, I bet you didn’t even know where Nigeria is, did you?
It’s okay, because I didn’t really know where it was either. When you live in the Northern world (the Minority World, as they say), Africa is totally portrayed as this foetid morass of primal discontent, a kind of heart-of-darkness that transcends boundaries. Nigeria is as Uganda is as Kenya is as Burkina Faso, and they are all the same, and they are all awful. Well, that is not exactly accurate. For example: Uganada has more fruit than Nigeria. And, like, good health care (better than Canada from the sound of it.) Nigeria has a merely decent amount of fruit and the kind of health care that makes you weep (despairingly, for days.)
The official language of Nigeria is English. However, there are over a hundred tribes, and consequently, over a hundred languages. Most people speak (pidgin) English — they also speak one of the most common tribal languages: Hausa, Yoruba or Igbo. Where I live, they speak Hausa, and so I’ve been learning it to. For instance, if I were to want to say, “Good christ, lady, these onions are expensive. I’ll pay 200 naira for five,” I’d say, “Kai, ya yi tsada. Zan biya biyar naira dari biyu.” The thrills never stop around here.
