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? SHA ZAM!

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.

Also, the chickens sleep in the trees.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 11:01 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.