Work

It’s probably high time I talked about what I do, or what I’m supposed to be doing, aside from staring at the trees waiting for people to show up to meetings and workshops, if they can be bothered. Officially, I am a Small-Scale Business Advisor for the sustainable livelihoods program in our host community. What that’s supposed to mean, it’s all a bit hazy now, and maybe always has been. What I actually do is wait for people to come back from the farm or the forest and get people from outside the village to teach them things so that they don’t go to the farm and forest as much. Tough, since villagers are around pretty much only on Fridays, which are market days, and Sundays, for church, and there is no way they can be pulled out of their farms, or church.

Escargot. Don’t knock it, but snail farms can actually bring money in Nigeria. In the north where everything is dry, they are priced as high as bushmeat. So I started with snail farms in the village, since we have them in our forest, but not enough to sell without farming. They’re low-cost and easy enough to take care of, which is a crucial detail, since the culture in my village is not exactly animal domestication oriented. I thought setting up four pilot farms would take about two months to set up (and then move on to other kinds of farms), but this was before I knew the time clock of the people. Two years is more like it. So then I realized people cannot work in groups (forget about cooperatives), and the youth were asking for trading skills instead, so I set up an apprenticeship program, hoping to bring in services into the village which people have to go elsewhere for. Unfortunately, the women didn’t know any other vocation apart from sewing, and had to ask permission from their husbands first. Meanwhile all the men just wanted to be drivers. And this is a village where there is not an inch of paved road. Well, let’s hope something comes out of those who have been selected.

I also tried a little organizational development, a bit of gender sensitivity (a lost cause), even a stint on HIV awareness (a foreign issue to me before coming to Africa). Into these I applied participatory approaches, a thing which I have taken for granted in my past work. The problem with democracy in Nigeria is that people are at a loss when presented with options. The concept of choice is quite hard to grasp when people have had no opportunities, and have been going on with their lives the same way as their parents and their parents before them, and are actually quite resistant to change, even when they moan and moan about their situation. So my time in Nigeria has probably been the least productive years of my life, except that I discovered the joy of cooking (since I don’t have a choice), learned how to cope with minimal amounts of water (no choice there either), and went through all the possible things that can go wrong with an old pick-up on a bad road. But as I keep saying, it has never been boring. Simply keeping your sanity here is a very high accomplishment. And for living in a village where land disputes are settled by burning down the house and where your new-found friend could be dead tomorrow by some unknown sickness, I take a bow. Oh yes, and I do thoroughly enjoy living in the middle of the rainforest, even if it means co-habiting with the lizards and running out of the house when the ants attack.