homecoming

One of the things I wish I had more time for (or rather, more access to laptop battery and online time) is writing stories in this blog. Two years in such an interesting continent amounts to a lot of tales, but unfortunately my time is up and I still have many blog post drafts in my mind. Maybe I will have the time in transit, or maybe I will still be inspired the first few days when I get home, or maybe you will just have to meet me for coffee somewhere (yes! real coffee!!!). I will make slideshows before I see anyone (with more photos for those who have seen my first slideshow, including my recent trek up amazing Mt. Cameroon), and I really look forward to catching up. I will have the same Smart number, and will be home Nov. 11 or thereabouts. See you soon!

hands

One of the interesting sights in Calabar, decidedly the best city in the country. Behind me is the Cross River.

pepe

In Iko Esai, if it’s not hot, then it’s not food. Lots and lots of chili pepper, ground to a pulp on a slab of rock, is what make Nigerian dishes. In the south, particularly, the popular food is “pepe soup” – goat or fish pepper soup, which is basically meat cooked in water and red hot chili peppers. And this can only be taken with rice, while other “soups” are supposed to be taken with what is called “swallow”, so named because they form some sticky mush into small balls, dip it in the soup and swallow without chewing. Into this category belong pounded yam, garri (cassava minus all the starch), fufu (fermented cassava), and semovita (some white mound made of wheat, popular in the north). Plantain (sab-a) is also a staple. What is called soup is not really soup as we know it, but a wet mixture of leaves sliced into tiny bits, onion, some kind of meat, usually also with dried fish, “maggi” (MSG cubes), and yes, pepper. Ask for rice to come with this and you spend half an hour explaining what you want. With all this variety in staple food (compared to rice for every meal in the Philippines), I really can’t understand why food here is the same wherever you go. And yet Nigerians scoff at Oyibo (white man) food, and wouldn’t touch most anything, particularly where garlic is concerned.

acquired skills

The road to camp during the rainy season. Among the skills I learn here are how to dig your pick-up out of a ditch, how to go across broken wooden bridges, how to change a flat without a jack... but as for this photo, well - this is just a Lakambini ad, hehe...

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.

Random Thoughts on Coming Back

It was the right decision to come back, but after three months of living in a sane world where real coffee can be had in any corner, I find that I have very little patience for Nigeria. I thought I had been refreshed but instead I just realized how things could be, and here I get really frustrated or annoyed at attitudes that don’t allow this country to be efficient and easy. Nigeria has turned me into my mother – I now expect the worst out of strangers. And this, I think, is a tragedy. I never realized how brand-conscious we were until a friend here, going over the stuff I had brought from home, asked me what the bag of Lay’s was. I replied, just read the packaging, but after several seconds of turning the bag over and over, I took the bag and saw it actually doesn’t say potato chips anywhere. Simply Lay’s, paprika, and it just presumes the whole world would recognize it. Have I already mentioned that a survival tactic here is to not think of this country as part of the rest of the world? It may have seemed ridiculous then, but coming back I'm really glad I brought a broom (silhig, walis tambo), which has made a great difference domestically. Other things I'm glad I thought of bringing are battery-operated MP3 speakers, sign pens, and cheez whiz. One can never bring too much cheez whiz. (They should have sponsored me instead of the cave congress.)