"We Break Up! We Break Down!"

“We break up! We break down!
We don’t care if the school falls down…”

We used to sing this at my primary school on the last day of term. Not hugely applicable to a quaint little school in Oxfordshire, but definitely appropriate to some of the schools I’ve encountered here.

Saturday was International Youth Day, and I hosted a competition between local schools. The schools were delighted to be involved and promised full cooperation and participation. What follows is my experience with one of the schools on the morning of the event.

I passed through the dramatic red gates of the school. There was a woman in the centre of the marshy playground. She called to a skinny man wandering around wearing only a hand towel, all I picked up was ‘onyotsha’ (white person in Yoruba). She then turned her glare in my direction and beckoned. I squelched across the ground, was this wild hair and low swinging boobs the same fiery Proprietress I had met a few months ago? ‘Do you remember me?’ she barked. I breathed deep. We sat down. To my alarm the man in the handtowel approached, interested in our conversation. ‘What did that other teacher say to you?’….. ‘er……’

I had zoomed in to rectify my situation (that of looming event start time and absent students) and was not about to be drawn into the management-staff battles going on behind the scenes. The issues however were rather interlinked. It appears that staff have not been paid for a while, and while the school administrator has been there for 13years (the proprietress refers to her as ‘my daughter because she is a nice person’) she remains totally incompetent.

So now, at the school site – instead of meeting with the agreed 40 students complete with banners, placards and songs of HIV messages, I met with an angry braless proprietress, a half naked teacher, no students in sight and my contact teacher quivering outside after being banished by the proprietress.

I managed to hold it together somehow, despite wanting to rip all their heads off, and eventually, around 2 hours later, the students from the school were arriving to the event complete with songs banners and placards, and ended up coming 3rd overall.

Out of 3.

Mace

The other day I left Wuse Market – the main market in Abuja – and needed to get a bike. There were two on the pavement so, after the usual haggle over the fair, I jumped on one of them and we set off. Heading up the pavement we came across a man of the uniformed services (not sure which one). He was not best pleased at seeing two okadas on the pavement and started yelling and waving his fists. He stepped towards my bike, but (I presume) saw me and decided to go for the other. He charged. There was a scuffle. The okada tried to escape, but was foiled, pushed into the wall by the uniformed man who was whipping out a can of pepper spray from his belt…. I sped away not wanting to be around any longer.

Forest Life

Hmm. This is the week of discovery. I’ve found that it is not only forgotten lunch that attracts raging forests of mould, but also anything that is left untouched for more than a day. My flip-flops, for example, my rucksack, even the plastic arms of my chair.

I’m keeping myself on the move lest I start sprouting furry spores

Today I discovered a lady in a zebra-print dress cooking her breakfast underneath the back of the container.

Things to Bring

A comprehensive guide of things to bring to a VSO placement in Nigeria……

1) Earplugs
2) A sharp knife (it’s easier to slice a tomato with the sharp edge of a ruler than use a local knife)
3) An electrical multi-socket (purchases made here usually lead to sparks and singed plastic)
4) Spare earplugs (you’ll get through them fast)
5) Tea towels (while you can get almost anything imaginable in some markets [see previous blog on shopping….] the tea-towel remains elusive. Requests for such items at local markets result in all sorts of profferings from the tender – a flannel, a sponge, a bed sheet, just never the right ‘I Love Scarborough’ type of tea-towel)
6) Mobile phone
7) Extra spare earplugs (in case you live next to church / mosque / both)
8) A flash disk
9) Patience (at least 70% of your baggage allowance must be made up of application form attributes such as patience, flexibility and endurance. A lot of people discover they packed insufficient amounts to cope with Nigerian demand, or, at critical moments, can’t remember which pocket they stored them in).
10) A headtorch
11) Ready-prepared answers to the following questions / comments: Are you married? What job can I get in your country? Can you get me a visa? Give me your number. Can you marry a Nigerian? I want us to know each other very well. I will follow you to your country. What did you bring for me?
12) A laptop with anti-virus/spy/missile software
13) Marmite.
14) Earplugs

Remembering the time….

...... ahh… time for reminiscing…. School sports day…. The bus on the way home…. Or rather the smell on the bus after sports day…..

Eh?

I have some visitors in my container. Funny how teenage boys smell the same the world over…..

Preaching

Yesterday, while waiting for Marebec, I found myself listening to a nearby church service. The preacher was busy addressing his flock, peppering his sermon with token attempts at encouraging participation; ‘Am I getting to somebody?........ Is somebody hearing me?.....’.

He was warning them about change in relationships; ‘She who walks like a cat today, walks bent and crooked tomorrow…’, and, urging the congregation not to choose looks as the basis of a relationship, he decided to further illustrate his point; ‘An eighteen year old may have pointed breasts today, but when she reach 45 years, the things have sagged….’

I didn’t get to hear if he continued beyond physical change, my attention-span stamina couldn’t hold me to his lecture for long enough.

Icicles

A gale blows around my head. My teeth chatter. My arms are all goosebumps and bristling hairs. My bare toes are purpley-blue. My fingers are stiff with cold and can only thump numbly at the keyboard.

I'm not actually typing epic tales from a mountain top in Siberia, but simply trying to send a few emails from the British Council, and my efforts are being severely hampered by the sub-zero temperature.

Can somebody please turn up the A/C? There's ICICLES hanging from it for gods sake.....

Don't Forget Your Lunch!

It’s never good to forget your lunch – that sinking feeling as you realise your error, the pangs of loss as you picture your cheese roll, wrapped, but forgotten, lonely on the sideboard, the childlike vulnerability as you wish your mum could be there to right your sorry plight…

No, it’s never good to forget your lunch – especially when you forget the same lunch for three whole days when it was already left-overs from the night before. It looked pretty suspect in the beginning, but now, three hot humid tropical days later, it takes a brave man to lift the lid of the Tupperware….

My! If ants had botanists they would surely marvel at the complex eco-systems growing inside! Their very own Eden Project! In fact, I think even an Oxford Master of Botany would be impressed at the rampant plant life that can be cultivated in a lunch box.