Six months in Naija and a strike

Six months ago on Saturday I stepped off the plane at 6am into a warm dawn in Abuja. Since then I’ve survived a journey through the Delta, a flood on my street, had malaria twice, avoided a baby trying to wee on me, made plenty of other babies cry, travelled to Bauchi, Kano, Calabar and Abuja,  attended workshops, run my own workshops and generally settled into work and living in Nigeria. This feeling at home didn’t come easily, and the other VSOs, my colleagues and neighbours have really helped the process . However I wouldn’t say I’ve achieved much work wise in six months, so the next six will be critical in ensuring I’ve really achieved something and made a difference at Hope for the Village Child when I leave at the end of February next year. Watch this space for more information on what I’m actually doing at work, and what Hope for the Village Child does.  

As if to celebrate my mile stone, this week the power company workers went on strike. Nigeria has a population of 150 million people and is one of the world’s largest oil producers, but only creates enough power for a city the size of Bradford. The power company has long been the subject of derision among Nigerians, and most people own generators to cope with the frequent power cuts. Formerly called the National Electric Power Authority, Nigerians fondly referred to it as Never Expect Power Always. Recently it became the Power Holding Company of Nigeria Plc, aka Problem has changed name, please light candle.

We’re quite lucky in the area we live in and we usually get around 7 hours of power a day, more in rainy season because much of the power is hydro electric so more is created. Although I’m writing this in the dark, we’ve had power all day, and I’m hoping it will come back this evening. But even when there is power the levels can be unpredictable, earlier in the year my laptop charger was destroyed by a high voltage surge at 5am.

As a result of their general inability to create power, when the workers went on strike last week, most people didn’t notice for about 24 hours! I was working at home, and used up two laptop batteries, one phone battery and two power monkey/gorilla charging devices before I started to wonder if there was a problem. When I arrived at work the next day with all my devices ready to be charged from the generator I was told there was a strike. The thing I hadn’t realised was that if there’s no power, there’s also no water, as power is needed to pump water into each house. This was actually more of a problem than no power, flushing the toilet takes up a lot of water, and I had a mountain of clothes which needed to be washed let alone washing myself. Luckily my land lord has large buckets full of water for these kind of situations and I was able to borrow from him for the three days it took the water to return. To help the shortage I tried to eat out as much as possible to avoid washing up, which was a very effective solution for me.

In total we didn’t have power for around 48 hours, and water for about 3 days, I can’t imagine what would happen if there were no water and no power at home for that long, but here everyone is completely prepared for it because they’re used to getting poor public services. Luckily now we’re back to normal ad hoc power and water levels again, so to celebrate I’m watching season 1 of glee in the wrong order! (That’s the way the dvd came).  

When it rains, it pours.

The months from June to September are rainy season in Nigeria. The rain here is hard to describe until you have experienced it. No one leaves home when it’s raining, there are no okadas on the streets and car drivers often pull over because their wipers aren’t strong enough to cope with the downpour. Saying you’re late to work because it rained is a very acceptable excuse.

The word ‘torrential’ goes some way to describing the storms in rainy season, but doesn’t explain the noise you hear when sat inside a small house with a tin roof during a storm. The rain drops are as hard as hail stones and when they are hammering on the roof they sound like they will break through at any moment. When this sound is accompanied by the knowledge that the street I live on floods every year in August, it creates a strange sensation which I like to refer to as PANIC.

My road is well known for flooding; ever since I arrived people have looked at me slightly oddly when I’ve told them where I live. This look is followed by a statement along the lines of “don’t you know it floods there?!”. We live right next to the river and when it rises the only place for it to go is into people’s homes, which is exactly what happened two weeks ago.

The river on Friday afternoon. 

The river back to its normal level after the flood

During the week the intensity of the rain had increased consistently, until on Friday evening the drainage ditches along the main road were filled to the brim after a particularly heavy storm, and the river was at the highest I’d seen it since arriving.

The river on Saturday morning, the photo
from Friday was taken by the
furthest away building. 

I woke up on Saturday morning to find the end of my road impassable. The water was up to the roof of some houses and the street behind was the only way out for cars and pedestrians without a canoe. 

Despite having no rain for three days the river continued to rise, getting closer and closer to my house.  There was a constant huddle of people around the edge of the water, holding debates on how high it would rise, making use of the problem by washing their motorbikes, and generally happy to hold forth on their opinions about the river to anyone who would listen. The Nigerian Red Cross even turned up at one point, suspiciously timed for when the tv crews came to visit. They had an inflatable boat, and a couple of volunteers, but no one offered me any psychosocial support!

The Red Cross make an appearance.

Okada drivers taking the opportunity to wash their bikes in
the flood water.  

When I woke up on Monday morning the flood had reached the outside of our compound gate. This was the point at which we decided to leave, unfortunately, it was a little too late. The road behind the house had been passable by cars the day before but the water was up to peoples chests when they waded through it. The only way out of our area was through a hole in the wall of an empty compound - only big enough for pedestrians - which was thoughtfully created by a crowd of shouting men at around 6am.

I had forewarned my counterpart at the office on Sunday that we may need to leave in a hurry and luckily HVC has quite a few Land Rovers, so they sent the cavalry - our driver Shuaibu and a colleague Ruth. Unfortunately, the cavalry got stuck....they’d seen a Toyota hilux pass through the water and assumed a Land Rover could too, but the water overcame the engine and they called me to say they were stuck in the water.

Luckily with a combination of skilful driving from Shuaibu and luck they escaped the river and got through to us, only to have to repeat the journey to get us out again! 

A Hilux navigates the flood on the street behind ours, the
day before we were rescued. 

I spent the next week staying with two other volunteers in their nice dry house far away from the river, and came back to my house a week later to find everything dry, the water hadn't risen any higher than the compound gate... and there were ants in my peanut butter.

  

Calabar - worth the trip.

First Nigerian road trip

In July I was invited to a VSO market development workshop in Calabar. I was quite interested in the workshop, but even more curious about Calabar, the capital city of Cross River state in the far south of Nigeria, which is close to the border with Cameroon. How naive of me to think that the most exciting part of the week would be the city itself, I'd forgotten the excitement of getting there! 

My adventure began on the journey to Calabar from Kaduna which I undertook with my colleague Mercy. We had been assured that one of the best bus companies in Nigeria, Cross Country, ran a service from Kaduna to Calabar, which left at 7am on Sunday morning. We arrived at the motor park at 6.30am and purchasing our tickets we waited for a while for the bus to fill up... before at 7.45 being told that we were the only two going to Calabar, so they’d take us to their ‘other park’ across town where we could get a bus to Calabar. On arriving at Akwa Ibon Transport Company (not another park, a completely different company), we discovered the bus was 500N cheaper, and about ten times less comfortable than the Cross Country bus. Still reassured we were on the only bus leaving Kaduna for Calabar that day we hopped aboard and tried to find the most comfortable way to sit for the next 12 hours.

Driving across Nigeria is a hair raising experience at the best of times, and this was my first journey south of Abuja, where there is a remarkable difference in the quality of the roads compared to the north. At some points the main road turns into a mud track, more designed for a Land Rover than a minibus, and at others it is so full of potholes that drivers drive on the wrong sides of the road to avoid them, swerving only at the last minute. Our speed of travel averaged around 140 km per hour, and involved plenty of overtaking lorries on hills whilst being on the wrong side of the road to avoid pot holes. As a result of being unable to tear my eyes away from the road in case it caused us to crash (no logic, just fear) I didn’t get much sleep. This wasn’t too bad as the scenery was spectacular, the south is much wetter than the north, with dense forests, and the landscape is much more rolling which gives spectacular views.

 We passed through Lokoja and where the road crosses over the confluence of the rivers Niger and Benue, which is the widest river I’ve ever seen, and an impressive sight. This photo shows the river Benue at another point, imagine about triple this size for the confluence of both rivers, it can’t be captured on camera from a moving vehicle which is my excuse for not trying...

As we got further south, Mercy told me we might be going to Uyo - the capital of Akwa Ibom state – and not Calabar. This was confusing, as we’d been clearly told the bus was going to Calabar, and also slightly worrying, as VSO’s are warned on a weekly basis not to visit any Niger Delta states, due to their well known reputation as locations for kidnappings. At this stage I wasn’t really sure if Akwa Ibom was considered officially in the Niger Delta, or just next to it, and we couldn’t get another bus anyway so I just continued to follow our journey on my map with rising concern. We were passing through a police or army checkpoint roughly every 15 minutes, and it was when the second soldier asked our driver (jokingly) if he had kidnapped me with the memorable phrase “You no go say you done kidnap dis oyibo” that I was pretty sure we were in the Delta. It seemed only me who actually laughed at the joke, and whilst tempted to say yes, I thought Mercy might get angry with me, and so I refrained.

After a ten hour journey, we ended up in Uyo in the gathering dusk, still two hours from Calabar, and in the Niger Delta. Although at this point I was still blissfully ignorant (if vaguely suspicious) of my newly found VSO rule breaking status, even I realised that travelling in the dark is not very safe, so I was glad when Mercy was able to persuade our driver to take us on to Calabar. After another two hours of overtaking at breakneck speeds, in the dark on single carriageway roads, we made it to Calabar at 9pm, 13 hours after we set out. The hotel was worth the wait, there were huge rooms, hot showers, CNN and good food. Here's Mercy enjoying her hard earned garri and stew. 

My learning from this journey... don’t try and travel from Kaduna to Calabar in one day, and I've since learned all the Niger Delta states off by heart, just in case. 

I’ll add another post on the beauty of Calabar and what market development actually means soon.