Kitty the kitten

This is Kitty, the newest resident of my household. He's a lean mean rat killing machine... or at least that's what we hoped for.



When we first collected him in his plastic basket from another VSO volunteer, he faced a very scary journey from the north of Kaduna to the middle. First in a bus full of chickens (none of the animals were happy about the situation) followed by an okada ride in his basket. Sadly we couldn't find a cat sized motorbike helmet.














Having survived the journey - despite his howling suggesting he might have a heart attack - he soon settled in to life at number 18 and made himself very much at home. He has a particular fondness for mosquito nets, having destroyed one so far, Kitty also likes to chew on toes, fingers, and worryingly electricity cables, I also bear the scars from the time he tried to climb my leg when I was wearing shorts. Other than his occasional violence, he is quite cute, and seems to be keeping the rats away which is great.

He does need a more exciting name than 'kitty' though, so if you have any suggestions let me know, the best suggestion will receive a letter of thanks signed by kitty from Nigeria.... in around 6 months.

In other news work is good, last week I went out to the village of Pambawa with the HVC roving clinic. I was trusted to weigh the babies and take their temperatures (hard to get wrong). When I put one of the babies on the scales, and stepped back to read his weight, I was followed by a trail of wee! Luckily for me I'd stepped back far enough to avoid getting wet, and everyone in the room was very entertained.

This weekend I went to Abuja for a VSO workshop, staying in a hotel with air conditioning and CNN was a real luxury. I also managed to fit in an afternoon of swimming at the British Village, which has a very nice pool that VSOs can use for free. I was amazed to see CNN's coverage of the flights chaos, hope no one reading this is stuck anywhere.

Easter and elephants*

Over Easter weekend I travelled across some of northern Nigeria with two other VSO volunteers Richard and Elizabeth. We left Kaduna on Friday afternoon - with an odd assortment of luggage items including a bottle of gin, motorcycle helmet and a kitten and returned on Easter Monday minus all said items, with some fun stories to tell.

On Friday night we stayed in Kano with Sophie, where we safely delivered the kitten and bottle of gin, in return for dinner (not of the kitten) mangoes and gin & tonics. Here's the kitten in it's basket on arrival, with a crowd of fascinated children...and Richard.



On Saturday we travelled to Bauchi, where we stayed with the fabulous Bauchi Boys, aka Father Leo and Noel, Irish priests who run a youth project and have been in Nigeria for 25 years. They have guest rooms where they put up (with) penniless VSOs... and kindly provided cold beer and plenty of amusing hats a few of which are modelled here...



On Easter Sunday we visited Yankari National Park, which contains a small population of lions, elephants, antelope and other animals. We took a safari tour, even though we’d been warned beforehand not to expect to see many animals. So we were very surprised to see a lioness and two of her cubs strolling through the bush! Sadly I can’t prove this with photographic evidence, as most of my photos are of bushes which may or may not have animals inside them. On the same trip we also saw waterbucks, antelops, warthogs, and western herdbeasts. Here's one of the antelopes.



Another highlight of the day at Yankari were the Wikki Warm Springs, stunning natural springs which are 31 degrees year round, and lovely to relax in.



The return on Monday was topped off by collecting our own kitten, brother to the one we took to Kano... photos will follow soon. Happy belated Easter to all!

*The title of this blog post is a little misleading, I gave into the alliteration... we didn’t see any elephants