Lost Kids

Originally uploaded by Fono.

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.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 9:46 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.