After my fabulous vacation in England, I returned via the overnight flight to Abuja, where I sat around the terminal for a couple hours while waiting for my connection down to Owerri. I could tell immediately that the drier winter weather had blown in, and it felt rather nice. In this sunrise shot from the Abuja airport, note the striped painting on the curbs – this is really a sweet thing I’ve noticed in several cities: green & white striped curbs (the national colors). It’s rather nice, don’t you think?
…and below are a few shots of me and various colleagues taken around the hospital compound during October & November. The final shot is an overview of the closest market to our hospital. In fact, a portion of the hospital is visible in the background but you have to know what you’re looking for…
December 22, 2007 | Categories: Abuja, Rivers State | Leave a comment
My most dedicated reader, fellow blogger and all-round conscience Ondrej has told me that he’s ‘eagerly watching the blog for new posts,’ so I’ve decided to pen a rambling entry that tries to capture a few wee slices of life here. Warning: it gets philosophical, and it ain’t short. But it’s what I got: with movements restricted, work hours long, and PHC not even Colombo, let alone Angkor Wat, I’m trying to make the most of the limited visual and thematic material I have here, and still keep y’all a bit informed about ma vie à Port Harcourt.
I realize that my non-MSF friends will never see the Port Harcourt I know and work in. I acknowledge also, with some sadness, that some (most?) of my non-MSF friends probably agree with Peter’s assessment that I have come to live and work in ‘the heart of darkness.’ My desire to convey some of what I’m living here for my friends and family faces many challenges. We have a general policy against taking photos outside the house or hospital — generally too many police, military, possible militants or gangs/cults with weapons around who wouldn’t want their photos taken, a general desire not to draw attention to ourselves or offend anyone, etc. (There’s a story about some expats who tried to take a photo of the MSF vehicle on the street one time, and ended up down at the police station for a short while until one of my predecessors came to rescue them and say nice words to the officer in charge. It functions as an effective cautionary tale.) A far greater challenge than the no-photo detail is the fact that I’m busy and my life is fairly full: and, as is common with us human animals, I’m already taking the realities of my life here rather for granted, after less than nine weeks. This means I sometimes don’t notice all the newness in my life, until we get a new surgeon like Matt, who just arrived from NYC for eight weeks after never being off the continent of North America before, and whose fresh eyes remind that, indeed, I’m no longer in Kansas.
My first weeks were characterized by an almost-giddy happiness that reminded me of the joy I felt while wandering the streets of NYC on lunchbreaks from my first job out of college. I had such a vivid delight in the fact that people whose intellects and purposes I respected were expecting, yes, needing me to return to the office from my lunch break so that I could answer their phones and make their photocopies that my heart sang with the joy of feeling wanted and useful. ‘Whatever,’ you’re thinking. Had they not been my emotions, were it someone else’s heart who’d experienced it, I too might find it peculiar. But the experience was there nonetheless, and I must admit that I had similar feelings in my first weeks here: almost an existential ‘Wow, it seems I actually can do this job, there actually is good work for me to do here, and my presence is worthwhile. Cool!’ After all, however much the last two years introduced me to MSF, I was still fairly in the dark about what I’d really be doing and what life would really be like once I got here to Port Harcourt: new continent, completely new type of project, and new role as Field Coordinator.
While it may appear false modesty, the fact is that — proud though I admit I am of my multilingualism and a few other skills such as my croissants and breakfast breads — I generally assume I’m a rather ordinary person with rather ordinary skills. That what I can do, pretty much anyone else can also do. At least if they apply themselves. It took living with someone for several years to ascertain that things I could do, he could not do. Of the corollary – that things others can do, I can’t do – I’ve always been painfully aware: it still hurts that I can’t play piano, take to the stage as a modern-dance heart-throb, or identify which elements are burning in a distant star by the color of its light through a telescope. Being a non-musical college student grunt at an Oberlin College which (even in the early 1980s, when admission rates were getting dangerously high) boasted more musical talent than an average evening at Carnegie Hall, along with an assortment of non-musical intellects and personalities that have gone on to shining careers in the arts, literature, science, politics and all the other fields of human endeavor simply reinforced my core sense of my own general averageness. Of which, let it be said, I was not at all ashamed — average is great; where would the world be without it?
As I hinted during one of the late-summer entries, one thing about many Americans’ reaction to my current career path that disturbs me is the tendency to heroicize what I’m doing. More broadly, Americans’ post-9/11 tendency to heroicize anyone who sets about accomplishing their chosen or assigned jobs with integrity, honor and generosity towards their fellow humans greatly disturbs me. If everyone who behaves with honor and integrity is to be a hero, then either the currency of heroism has been sadly devalued or — more to the point, I fear — the currency of averageness has been dragged into the gutter. Returning to my original point about Port Harcourt: I’m here to do a job, and my first weeks were illuminated by my pleasure at discovering that I was up to the task. I don’t usually take this for granted, certainly about any new situation into which I’m putting myself.
The giddy phase – we’ll call it ‘chapter one: the honeymoon’ – ended around the time I posted my last entries. Many readers might have noted a certain snippiness and whinyness about such trifles (existentially speaking) as bandwidth and performance of internet connections. There ensued a phase (‘chapter two: teenage tantrums’?) in which my moods swung widely, with the general trend being towards frustration and impatience. These are my usual faults so it was not unexpected, but I was disappointed in myself nonetheless. After all, where was the gratitude at a life which made it possible for me to have fried plantain with delicious lentil stew while pondering how best to inform our neighbors and target populations of the medical services we are here to provide?
The good news is that I appear now to have emerged into a new, more grounded (and not in the teenage “you’re grounded!” sense) phase. I’m more able to accept that which I can’t change (in keeping with my standard policy of not going into any great detail about my work life, let’s simply stipulate that there have been some staffing situations, actually lack-of-staffing situations, which have left a bit to be desired), and find much joy in focusing on those areas where I can have an impact, on that which I can change. And it’s fun!
As you’d expect from a job which, in its office part, takes up six full days a week, finding my groove at work is helping find my groove in that which passes for my ‘outside life’ here. And, let it be said, whenever I’m in Port Harcourt I’m essentially on duty: I’m someone who carries around two mobile phones permanently so as to be easily reachable – how sad is that?Specifically, this means I’m jogging some mornings, doing more yoga, pulling out 哈利泼特与魔法石 (for those of you whose computers lack the Chinese character set: that’s Harry Potter & The Philosopher’s Stone) and giving the Chinese-reading muscles in my brain a bit of a workout, etc. etc. Things that give me a bit more sense of wholeness and balance in body and mind, and leave me with some outlets outside work – which can get intense at times.
Feeling happy and balanced in life allows one to see more of the beauty in one’s surroundings. I’ve pointed out in prior posts that PHC has fallen a long way since the days when it was dubbed the Garden City, but it does have its charms. Chief among these are the people — the books I studied, the people I spoke with before coming here, all painted the same pictures: this is one vibrant, alive, energetic nation full of fascinating, engaged, lively, friendly and outgoing people. Most of my colleagues at work are a true pleasure to work with. Many of the people on the streets are friendly and outgoing. Yes, militants regularly kidnap oil-business exaptriates and feed them excellent food while waiting for the ransom money to be handed over so the hostages can be released. Yes, sometimes the food isn’t that good and the hostages are killed while being kidnapped or mistreated while being held. But as I’ve said before, the streets of New York can be mighty dangerous at any given moment of day or night, for the wrong person in the wrong place or time. So it’s all about balance.
And speaking of balance, I’m still in love with all the things folks carry on their heads. Just the other day while doing some reading on one of the balconies at the hospital, I noticed one of our kitchen staff (with an 80-bed hospital, we naturally have a kitchen staff) carrying a tray full of dirty dishes (all plastic) back to the kitchen from the wards on top of her head. I may camp out on said balcony some day, camera in hand, in hopes of capturing this image for posterity.
Then there are the street vendors. In New York a guy sets up a virtual-restaurant of a falafel stand, complete with wheels, deep-fryers, generator and refrigerator sections — and we call him a street vendor. HAH! At Garrison Junction, one of the main intersections in town through which we often pass on the commute to or from work, there are virtual mini-marts of human ingenuity both moving and stationary — and all pretty much free of hardware. We start some 30 to 50 meters back from the light: at least a dozen, often two or three dozen, vendors hawking bottles of soft drinks, packages of fried plantain chips, bags of lemons and oranges, and mobile phone cards. They run between the cars holding out their wares, and when someone reaches out a hand they’re prepared to run along beside the car as it starts moving again while finishing the exchange. More than once, I’ve seen a banknote simply thrown to the wind as the car speeds too fast for the vendor to keep up, and then seen a vendor have to track the bill as it swirls through car tires until there’s another holdup or red light so he can dive down in relative safety and recover his pay. With hundreds of vehicles all of which view lane-marking lines as road art rather than directives to be obeyed, and a few major streets all coming together at this point, you can imagine the number of times I’ve seen near-catastrophe. It’s my fervent hope that they’ll always remain near, and never become real catastrophes. We see enough victims of trauma at the hospital; I don’t need to see any more when away from the hospital.
After the literal on-street running vendors, we get the more established vendors. These folks set themselves up mainly in the median strip (‘central reservation,’ they call it in England and perhaps here, I think) — which is a quite narrow little island of concrete past which the diesel-smoke-belching used cars with their CH, F, D and NL stickers all roar. (At first it bewildered me, how many European cars seem to be taking a vacation in the tropics – until I figured out that these are all used cars sold – stolen? – in Europe and brought to Nigeria for the used-car market.) Here on the narrow strip of concrete you have guys with boxes of noodle soups, watches, handkerchiefs, underwear and other sundries for sale. It’s really all quite enterprising and impressive, though my heart goes out to their poor lungs: truly, the air in PHC is scary. My friends keep saying you’re worried about…fear not for me, dear friends: fear for my lungs! 🙂
Though it’s a bit unfair in an entry that mostly about how I’m loving Nigeria and my job here, I simply must throw in another little slice-of-life vignette from recent weeks here in the Niger Delta. Since the political and development situation of the Niger Delta is a source of ongoing conflict and tension for Nigeria, the nation’s senate decided to convene a five-day meeting here in Port Harcourt, which is the largest city in the Delta. They were here to understand first-hand what’s happening and why. To take the temperature of the citizens, to see the man on the streets and so forth. As one of the largest zones of mangrove swamp in the world, and the largest river delta in Africa (yes, I do believe it’s larger than the Nile delta), there are huge areas of swampy mangrovy territory where people traditionally lived and fished, and where they now live and don’t so much fish since oil spills have killed a lot of the fish and made farming a lot more difficult, or at least that’s how I understand it. It’s in these areas, called ‘the creeks’ or ‘the riverine communities’ that the deepest anger about the delta’s development and economic state lies, and also where the greatest poverty is, it seems. It’s also where the armed groups tend to hang out since it’s easiest to hide there. It’s also where most of the oil comes from. Read: the creeks are a fascinating, troubled and dangerous place. The Senate decided it was going to do a few trips into the creeks. Before they went, the Senate president put out an official warning to the militants: please don’t kidnap us while we’re in the creeks, he said. Why should they not kidnap him? Because the senate had no money allocated in its budget for ransom money.
…and speaking of unfair, I just couldn’t resist including this photo. 🙂
But perhaps my greatest joy here is the names. This is a deeply religious nation. Centuries ago, Islam crossed the Sahara and took root in what are now the northern regions of Nigeria. In the late 19th century, British mercantile adventurers took greater control of southern and coastal Nigeria than they had previously exercised from the mostly-offshore forts whence they controlled their portion of the slave trade (at least until Britain outlawed slaving, long before America’s civil war). Nigeria’s south, particularly the Niger Delta region, had remained a stubbornly independent and autonomous bastion of small tribal and clan leaders and kings who followed a traditional way of life based on farming, hunting and fishing that had been in existence for milennia, most likely, more or less unchanged. A few greedy Brits decided to put an end to all of that in order to corner the market on palm oil, which had many uses for industry and commerce, and which this region produced in abundance.
As always, with British capitalists and colonists came British missionaries. In recent decades, West Africa and Africa as a whole have become fertile territory for a wide range of pentecostalist and born-again Christian denominations and sects, but in the early years I think it was mostly Church of England. This is all a long way of saying that down here, Christianity is dominant, and they take it seriously. And they reflect it in their given names. I’ve never, ever lived anywhere with such fabulous names. I’ve never dreamed that names could even BE so fabulous! Blessing, Comfort, Patience and Lucky are fairly common. Godswill and Goodluck often appear in the newspapers or among job applicants. Recently I saw a fun name for the very first time: Godknows. As in other parts of West Africa, many folks are named after the day of the week on which they were born — so we have Sunday, Monday and Tuesday every so often.
But my favorite so far, truly my favorite, is Happiness. With Happiness comes a story. Our friend and
colleague Devika was leaving PHC after six months as our expat ward doctor, and returning Oz. Several Nigerian staff colleagues wanted to throw her a party at our house (great dance space in the courtyard/parking area in front of the house – see pics attached) and planned to provide the beer, Maltina and sound system. I agreed to kick in with groundnuts (you may know them as peanuts) and digestive biscuits, etc. Groundnuts in Nigeria often come in bottles — not jars, but tall bottles like wine bottles.
(Cf. figure at left.) My favorites come from a company called “Annointed Fingers G’Nuts.” Not sure about the image it calls up, but what poetry for a name, huh? For this occasion, another colleague had pointed out that the street vendors down the block from our house sell peanuts, either wrapped up tight in little dime-bags of plastic wrap or by the bottle, less expensively than our corner store.
So I trooped over and asked the ten-year-old sitting on the cinder block by the box of peanuts if she had any bottles. Sad eyes: no. How much for the dime-bags? 10 naira. I counted them out: about 24 of them, so about US$2 for the bunch. I said I’d take them all. HAPPY EYES! Enormous smile! It was late on a Saturday afternoon, and this meant, with all her merchandise sold, she’d get to go home and play, or at least not have to hang around and work. We asked if she’d be around tomorrow, maybe with more peanuts, so we could buy more for the party. Maybe. We asked her name: Happiness. Walking back to the house, I imagined the mindset in her proud parents’ heads when they first held her and chose to name her Happiness. The next day, Rachael and I went to the corner to see if the was there again. She was not. Result: we walked around a bit, asking the other vendors if they knew where we might find Happiness. 🙂
How could you NOT love a place like this?!
November 4, 2007 | Categories: Nigeria, Rivers State | Tags: happiness | Leave a comment
OK, peeps: these are they: the first thought-out blog entries from Nigeria. Nearly a week in the making, nearly that much in the posting…amazing, huh? Enjoy! Lord only knows when I’ll muster the patience to try so many uploads again… As you’ll maybe be able to tell, it was all written nearly a week ago, and I’ve been back in PHC for a while now. So happy to get back to my fabulous project and excellent colleagues. 🙂
It’s roughly 3:00 on a quiet and lazy Sunday afternoon, October 14th to be quite precise. I’m sitting alone in the living room of the MSF expat house in the suburbs of Abuja, listening to some music and pondering the meaning of life and other imponderables. (The music, I feel moderately embarrassed to admit, is The Return of the King soundtrack…but after that I’ve got some jazz and some blues cued up.) A mere two hours ago I gave up any hope of uploading all the photos I’d hoped to post on here – all the nice photos I broke up my jog yesterday morning to take, that jog and those photos that spurred the rambling philosophical exegesis you shall find below under the heading “Aspirational Abuja.”
October 19, 2007 | Categories: Abuja, Nigeria | Leave a comment
That’s the Hilton in question.
Why did we have to break off our upload? Wherefore uploadus interruptus, you ask? so much world, so little time ran out of time – did I name my blog well or what? So many photos, so little bandwidth – even on what the Hilton’s ‘business center’ advertised as dsl broadband! Without an internet cable, we found ourselves (split personalities: another benefit to the African lifestyle – buy one, get several more for free!) unable to connect to the net in the room even if we’d chosen to pay the $25 fee for 24 hours of in-room access. The additional $5 to buy the cable was just over the top: being able to post then and there was simply not worth it, when added to the slings and arrows of the (otherwise comfortable and generally acceptable) Hilton’s highway-robbery room rates and fees. (Examples, you require? My best negotiating skills, honed over two tough years in the hardscrabble Middle Kingdom, gleaned me only a $150-per-night standard room right next to the cleaners’ storage room in which, it seemed, they enjoyed many conversations over the course of the day. When the hotel room offered neither filtered water nor even a comp’d bottle or two of water to get me rehydrated sans amoebas, I splurged on the $3.00, 750-ml bottle {yes: $3 for less than a quart of water}, figuring I’d find a store on the premises to stock up on bigger bottles at a better price later. NOT! Elsewhere in the hotel, the same bottles could be found for the reasonable fee of $3.50! And nowhere was a full liter, let alone 1.5 liter bottle to be found. H-i-g-h-w-a-y r-o-b-b-e-r-y. Can I afford it, yes. But it’s the principal, darn it! Nigeria is expensive, but get real.)
But getting back to our frayed narrative thread: we were talking about interrupted uploads. We later attempted to pull off plan B: write the notes offline, store them to a USB key, and then log on for one quick hour of highly-efficient uploading of photos, etc. And rest assured, it has been the experience of this smw, slt correspondent that one hour can be more than sufficient for a highly enjoyable and successful uploading session. An hour has more than sufficed for the planned volume, in our experience – experience gleaned on three continents, no less!
October 19, 2007 | Categories: Abuja, Nigeria | Leave a comment
I’m pretty sure that’s Aso Rock, after which the presidential house in named in common parlance here; the tall concrete thing in the background before the mountain is probably the house of parliament. Don’t ask me why, in a city where I was allowed to run or walk freely, I did not walk closer to inspect. I have no answer other than laziness.
But said gleaning had not yet taken place in Africa, and yes, it seems Africa still is something else altogether at least when it comes to communications and the internet. Had it been only the slow connection, I’d still have gotten deeper into the upload than I did. But nooooooo. The working hypothesis du moment is that the computer in the ‘business center’ at which I had set up shop didn’t like my USB key. While it accepted the photos you see below under the headings “Frustrated in Abuja” and “Mile Three Market, Port Harcourt,” multiple attempts to transfer the photos from my laptop to the ‘business center’ desktop came to naught – despite a complete erasure and reformatting of said USB key followed by reloading of selected critical photos, all while the clock ticked away on my 40-cent per minute block of internet time.
The upside? I get some extra time to vent my spleen in this extra text that no one will ever read. (Haha! comment on that, if you dare!) The downside? Now I can only cross my fingers and hope it’s not the key itself. Hope that this text I’ve taken such pains to make at least moderately entertaining won’t itself vanish down the sinkhole of corrupted filedom. Hope that whenever I next find myself in front of a computer with something that passes for an internet connection – which, most likely, will be Wednesday when I get back to PHC and our lovely dialup wifi connection that might, just might, be the source of the frequent crashes we experience on our computers – I shall find not only those selfsame photos, but also this very text, intact for posting onto our beloved smw, slt blog site so you all can chuckle over the foibles of an expat lost in the communications wilderness that is Nigeria. Hope: a good word, a lovely notion, and purrrrrfect segue to our next heading…
Love ya, mean it.
October 19, 2007 | Categories: Abuja, Nigeria | Leave a comment
Abuja is the Nigeria’s capital. It is neither Nigeria’s most important (population, business, international connections, etc.) city, nor its best-known city; both of those honors belong to Lagos, the “metropolis of Africa.” An article in some American newspaper talked about how many Lagosians refer to Lagos at “the New York City of Africa.” From all I’ve heard, Lagos is big, brash, loud, full of life and energy, business and crime, reality and potential. Lagos was also the capital of the Federal Republic of Nigeria until some time in the 1990s, when Abuja was deemed complete enough for the government to relocate itself here.
October 19, 2007 | Categories: Abuja, Nigeria | Leave a comment
Abuja, I think, is rather like the idea of Nigerian nationhood: as much an aspiration as a reality. The dominant view when one enters the city from the west – where the airport is; also, it happens, where both MSF’s office and its expat residence are located – is of two large and dramatic religious structures: the National Mosque, and the National Christian Center. These two elegant and dramatic buildings, situated in line with each other on the central axis through what will (one hopes) some day be downtown Abuja, strike me as quite emblematic of that which is Nigeria, that which is Abuja. 
As much aspiration as reality, they seem to say that these two great monotheistic religions do – or is it can? or might? or should? – cohabit peacefully in this nation. As these photos will attest, though, Abuja is a city very much under construction, very much still in planning. One could imagine signs saying “pardon our dust while we reconstruct the national nerve centre and create a symbolic capital with which all our multidudinous ethnicities, tribes and regions can feel comfortable, of which they can all be proud.”
October 19, 2007 | Categories: Abuja, Nigeria | Leave a comment
The highlight, so far, of the two days I’ve now spent on my R&R weekend here in Abuja was the jog I was free to take around town yesterday morning, from which all of these photos of Abuja come. While my life in Port Harcourt is very rewarding on the professional level – I enjoy my colleagues both national and expatriate very much, I find the work both challenging and rewarding, and I am relieved and proud to see that I’ve regained my MSF sea-legs quite rapidly after a summer of sloth in LA – it does become a bit constraining on the personal front. We work six day weeks, our movements are pretty limited so as to reduce risk of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and even without those restrictions it’s not like there’s really a lot to see and do in Port Harcourt – though were the situation different, I ca imagine it would be great fun to kayak or canoe around the creeks and mangroves south of the city proper. That being a total pipe dream, we longer-term expats get every sixth weekend or so off for total R&R. We can check into a hotel in town for a two-day weekend, or head to Abuja, or one or two other stable and relaxing places around Nigeria. This time I chose Abuja, so I can spend some time after the weekend in our coordination office up here, to which I had only the briefest introduction on my arrival in early September.
October 19, 2007 | Categories: Abuja, Nigeria | Leave a comment
So I ran around town on a Saturday morning, just after the second day of Id al Fitr, the most important (?) festival in the Muslim calendar, marking as it does the end of Ramadan. And Abuja reminds me of the new parts of Nanning, where I lived more than two years ago: wide, grandiose boulevards empty of cars and nearly devoid of people. Imposing government buildings, with nary a restaurant, hardware store, supermarket or shoe shine stand in sight. Gazing from the fourth-floor window of my room at the Hilton, where I’ve enjoyed room service and a fabulous hexagonal pool for the past two days, I see hills and residential compounds, lush greenery…and no sign of people on the streets. I hope Abuja can get it together. I hope Nigeria can get it together. It’s two years older than me; on October 1 they celebrated their 47th anniversary. For something like half of those years the country was under military dictatorship. This spring it managed the first transition from one civilian government to another, albeit after an election which international observers found utterly flawed.
This country is pivotal to Africa; it’s pivotal to the energy future of much of the world, being the largest exporter of oil in Africa. One in five Africans is Nigerian; but it’s not yet clear to me how many Nigerians identify first as Nigerian, and only second as a member of whatever religion, ethnicity or region they come from. The hope and beauty of the two religious centers that form the heart of Abuja are something I can agree with, whatever my objections to organized religion per se: the entire world will benefit if these and other religions can finally learn to coexist peacefully, within countries and within the world as a whole. It is perhaps fair to say that Nigeria’s first 47 years were a steady erosion of the promise and potential that seemed evident at independence from England. Still and all, there is reason to hope – despite flawed elections, the country has an active civil society, a flourishing press, and pretty good internet communications. It has abundant natural and human resources. I think we should all hope that Nigeria’s next 47 years will be a steady climb back up that ladder of hope and prosperity; that its regions, religions and ethnicities can agree on some core ideals and values that can define a meaningful Nigerian nationhood – and that none of those values will be the current national pastime of graft and corruption; and that the rest of the world will learn to take Nigeria – Africa’s superpower, such as it is – more seriously.
This is it: the only shot I managed to get that showed both the National Mosque and the National Christian Center. (Elsewhere, since I wrote all this, I believe I’ve seen it referred to as the National Ecumenical Center as well. But, as above sign from the Nigerian Tourism Development Corporation shows, it’s also the NCC.)
October 19, 2007 | Categories: Abuja, Nigeria | Leave a comment
Ok, I admit it, putting this up as my last photo from Abuja is a bit cynical. This building is the Nigerian Communications Commission. I don’t know what their mandate is, but I suppose it has – on paper and in theory at least? – something to do with…getting good communications going in Nigeria, maybe? HAH! See notes below about the “high-speed” internet at the Hilton “business center.” If that’s as good as it gets in this country, you can imagine what I’m living with down here in Port Harcourt. Then there’s the fact that basically no one I know has a landline…mostly because it seems the telephone companies periodically show up saying you owe them, like, a few jillion dollars for calls you pretty much never made. Or the fact that, despite their relatively small size (I think I’m gonna have to downsize them even more, though…), I have to load these photos up one at a time onto the blog, since dialup connections (wifi at that, for the above-mentioned reason about landlines…) are more or less nonexistant here. So anyhoo, memo to Nigerian Communications Commission: try putting more effort into your work product, and less into your nice-looking building. It is rather a nice-looking building, isn’t it? And just around the corner from the Hilton, hey!
October 19, 2007 | Categories: Abuja, Nigeria | Leave a comment
…two more images did make the transfer intact: above, an Owerri sunset taken from the hotel room in which I spent my first night in Nigeria, since my flight from Abuja to Owerri landed too late to make it down to Port Harcourt before dark. Below: me at dinner one evening recently. Don’t I look like the happy little guy I am? 🙂
…Well, friends, here we are at the Hilton in Abuja. 45 minutes of the $25-an-hour “high speed internet” time I invested in have been sucked into posting the paltry assembly of photos you see below. My USB key has gone back and forth between my laptop and the desktop I’m using at the ‘business center’ more times than I can count, and each time something or other has become corrupted. Somewhere in there, if I’m ever able to recover it all, are some photos of the dramatic and aspirational buildings of Abuja; somewhere in there is what I flatter myself is a rather poetic text about Abuja’s and Nigeria’s aspirations. All this on a day that also saw the ATM machine in the Hilton’s lobby steal my card and, so far, not return it…though security insists someone is coming from UBA any time now who will take the machine apart and find my card in its innards.
I’ll have to hope I can recover them somehow or other, tonight back at the MSF house here in town, or later back in PHC. Lord only knows how I’ll survive trying to upload that many photos on the dialup wifi down there, considering that using the “high speed” here has pretty much killed me. 🙂 But such are the challenges one expects when traveling in these places, and it’s not like I should be surprised by any of it. I just got so spoiled by the connections I had in Sri Lanka and China. Africa, it seems, at least in this regard, is truly another matter.
Much love to you all. I’m well and my thoughts are with you. Send up some thoughts for peace and goodwill towards our fellow travelers on this green and blue planet.
October 14, 2007 | Categories: Abuja, Nigeria | Leave a comment
October 14, 2007 | Categories: Nigeria, Rivers State | Leave a comment
Port Harcourt is the capital of Rivers State and the center of Nigeria’s petroleum industry. It is, I think, the third-largest city in Nigeria after Lagos and Kano. (But don’t quote me on that one.) It is certainly the major metropolis of the vast Niger delta, one of the largest remaining areas of mangrove swamp in the world, and home to enormous reserves of light and sweet crude oil which is greatly coveted for its relatively easy refining into the fuel that runs the millions of vehicles clogging America’s highways. It’s an area rich in history and conflict, and it’s where I’ll be living for a while to come, I hope.
Despite movement restrictions, we still have to get out every now and then to do our work. Not long ago I was out with some of my colleagues to do some outreach about our services in one of the local markets. Here are a few images from that outing. Enjoy.
October 14, 2007 | Categories: Nigeria, Rivers State | Leave a comment
…Against all this, it almost seems incredible that smiles come so readily to Nigerian faces. An international survey in 2003 announced that Nigerians were in fact the happiest people on earth. The important role that relgion plays in everyday life is a major factor, along with the natural entrenpreneurship of one of Africa’s best-educated populations. Ill-served by repeated governments, Nigerians have had to learn to survive. As Fela Kuti sang, “we suffer and we smile.” This resilience holds the best key to Nigeria’s future.
–Lonely Planet, West Africa guide book
Port Harcourt, Nigeria – a rainy Sunday afternoon, late in the rainy season. The tropical rain’s pitter-patter is interrupted on occasion by shouts from neighbors reacting to the team Nigeria football (Americans: that’s soccer) match that’s on now. There are two other quotes I’d have liked to include with the above note, one from the same guidebook’s Port Harcourt section, to the effect that political violence preventer the writers from visiting PH before publication, so the information may be out of date, and advising potential travelers to scrutinize the recent news from the region carefully before planning any travel here. The other I shall paraphrase here while referring all readers who can possibly make time to a stupendously lyrical, informative and beautiful ode to African entitled The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuscynski, who for 40 years criss-crossedAfrica as Poland’s first Africa correspondent, from the dawn of post-colonial Ghana & Uganda to the turn of the milennium. Commenting on one of the many dicey situations in which he found himself (coups, revolutions, famines, lost in the desert…you name it, the guy experienced it all), he noted that an unstable place almost always seems worse when viewed from outside. This is SO true: most of the time, in most places, most people go on with their lives, however circumscribed their options may be. And avoid accident and injury. So while I do urge my friends and family to read about Nigeria, to follow the news and learn about this enormous and important country, I also urge you to remember that millions of people live here and get along more or less fine somehow. 🙂
Anyway here I am. There won’t be very many posts from PH: I’ve made it, finally, to a classic MSF field post where we work six full days a week and spend the evenings and weekends enjoying our life together as a team, over scrabble (I brought travel scrabble: someone might wnat to let Seth know that all these years later, the game he gave me crossed the ocean so I and a few colleagues are thankful to him), dvd’s (Winnie and Charles: the team is SO thankful!) or simply a cup of tea and conversation. The internet connection is adequate at best and won’t support uploads of many photos. I think the team is great and I’m going to love working with them. Our life is rather circumscribed by realities — one doesn’t go out between dusk and dawn if one can avoid, given the condition of the roads and other safety considerations, and of course it being the tropics our days and nights are pretty much 12 hours year-round…which means that, aside from Sunday, we don’t have much free time during daylight to go anywhere. Which is fine. There’s a pool/club not far from here and it seems we head out there when we can for a swim and a beer, and we’ll shortly head off for the bar around the corner to celebrate a teammate’s birthday. Since I don’t like posting text without photos, this means there won’t be much to post for a while! So you all can catch up on old posts, haha.
But I’ll share a few initial impressions, just for the heck of it. It was a long haul to get here: JFK–>Heathrow–>Abuja–>Owerri, then a 2-hour+ drive to Pt Harcourt, whose airport is closed. Over potholes that could swallow NYC’s worst as a canape, past endless stands of palm and banana trees, through villages small and large adorned with more pentecostal-type “church of god” signs than one could imagine exist in such a small cluster of shacks (is church of god redundant? what else would a church be of?), past open stands whose baskets are piled high with bananas, cornmeal and rice, we made our way south to Port Harcourt, and I knew we were close when I saw my first tower burning off the natural gas collected in the oil refining process. Kids in school uniforms, mothers with babies tied around their waists with colorful sashes, men in colorful matching traditional-seeming tops and bottoms or wearing the white caps that I assume mean they’re Muslim; all motorbiking and walking along the roads. Hundreds of motorbikes, many jammed full with several friends and never a helmet to be seen. Vibrant and alive is how things seem to me so far. But these are the towns and cities on a major road, which I assume are a bit richer than more remote towns. Don’t know if I’ll ever see those. Anyway — here I am and here I’ll remain. If I get a chance to take any pictures, I’ll share them with you at some point. In the meantime, take care, be kind to your neighbors, spare some thought or time for reading about Africa when you can, and be in touch!
September 9, 2007 | Categories: Nigeria, Rivers State | Leave a comment
OK, peeps, here they are: the final pix and entries you’ll be seeing for some time. We start with photos taken in the latter stages of my cross-country trek in late May: these were all taken at rest stops in Colorado and Utah, aside from the beautiful sunset shot just below, which was taken from the moving vehicle just north of St. George, Utah, the evening before my arrival in LA. Driving across the US is almost always a pleasure for me — it’s so big and beautiful, and I’m sorry I didn’t get the camera out earlier to record tornado-laden thunderclouds over the great plains; wide, generous streams running through green grassy fields in the midwest; my beloved alma mater of Oberlin; or the great long weekend Steve & I spent with Heather in Pittsburgh seeing operas, exhibits and plays. I’ve got one month of vacation left, and I plan to shut down completely in order to be fully rested before heading off to Port Harcourt, Nigeria, which is my next planned assignment. (Assuming nothing changes, viz dental nightmares noted below…) Wish me luck, take care of yourselves, enjoy the pix and texts, and drop me a note when you can.
To my shock and horror, my summer vacation is mostly over. And it really has been a summer vacation, like we used to have as schoolkids: what a treat! In response to requests…mostly from my beloved Ondrej (who’s solidly in love with someone else, so any single guys out there take heart: I’m still eminently available, more’s the pity)…I started taking pictures of the American landscapes I traveled through en route from Pittsburgh to LA. I’ve also continued, for the sake of my non-American friends who are holding off on US visits until they’re too old to go trekking on Borneo, to record some of what I’ve been up to here in California. As I draft this on August 2, I’m sitting in my favorite café on Noe Street in San Francisco, possibly my most-loved city in the world and certainly one of those in which I feel most at home, and pondering the fact that in about about six weeks I’m likely to be en route to Nigeria, which appears to be my next assignment. More on that when the time is right.
August 3, 2007 | Categories: United States | Leave a comment
colleague Devika was leaving PHC after six months as our expat ward doctor, and returning Oz. Several Nigerian staff colleagues wanted to throw her a party at our house (great dance space in the courtyard/parking area in front of the house – see pics attached) and planned to provide the beer, Maltina and sound system. I agreed to kick in with groundnuts (you may know them as peanuts) and digestive biscuits, etc. Groundnuts in Nigeria often come in bottles — not jars, but tall bottles like wine bottles. (Cf. figure at left.) My favorites come from a company called “Annointed Fingers G’Nuts.” Not sure about the image it calls up, but what poetry for a name, huh? For this occasion, another colleague had pointed out that the street vendors down the block from our house sell peanuts, either wrapped up tight in little dime-bags of plastic wrap or by the bottle, less expensively than our corner store.
It’s roughly 3:00 on a quiet and lazy Sunday afternoon, October 14th to be quite precise. I’m sitting alone in the living room of the MSF expat house in the suburbs of Abuja, listening to some music and pondering the meaning of life and other imponderables. (The music, I feel moderately embarrassed to admit, is The Return of the King soundtrack…but after that I’ve got some jazz and some blues cued up.) A mere two hours ago I gave up any hope of uploading all the photos I’d hoped to post on here – all the nice photos I broke up my jog yesterday morning to take, that jog and those photos that spurred the rambling philosophical exegesis you shall find below under the heading “Aspirational Abuja.”
I’m pretty sure that’s Aso Rock, after which the presidential house in named in common parlance here; the tall concrete thing in the background before the mountain is probably the house of parliament. Don’t ask me why, in a city where I was allowed to run or walk freely, I did not walk closer to inspect. I have no answer other than laziness.
This country is pivotal to Africa; it’s pivotal to the energy future of much of the world, being the largest exporter of oil in Africa. One in five Africans is Nigerian; but it’s not yet clear to me how many Nigerians identify first as Nigerian, and only second as a member of whatever religion, ethnicity or region they come from. The hope and beauty of the two religious centers that form the heart of Abuja are something I can agree with, whatever my objections to organized religion per se: the entire world will benefit if these and other religions can finally learn to coexist peacefully, within countries and within the world as a whole. It is perhaps fair to say that Nigeria’s first 47 years were a steady erosion of the promise and potential that seemed evident at independence from England. Still and all, there is reason to hope – despite flawed elections, the country has an active civil society, a flourishing press, and pretty good internet communications. It has abundant natural and human resources. I think we should all hope that Nigeria’s next 47 years will be a steady climb back up that ladder of hope and prosperity; that its regions, religions and ethnicities can agree on some core ideals and values that can define a meaningful Nigerian nationhood – and that none of those values will be the current national pastime of graft and corruption; and that the rest of the world will learn to take Nigeria – Africa’s superpower, such as it is – more seriously. 
This is it: the only shot I managed to get that showed both the National Mosque and the National Christian Center. (Elsewhere, since I wrote all this, I believe I’ve seen it referred to as the National Ecumenical Center as well. But, as above sign from the Nigerian Tourism Development Corporation shows, it’s also the NCC.)
Ok, I admit it, putting this up as my last photo from Abuja is a bit cynical. This building is the Nigerian Communications Commission. I don’t know what their mandate is, but I suppose it has – on paper and in theory at least? – something to do with…getting good communications going in Nigeria, maybe? HAH! See notes below about the “high-speed” internet at the Hilton “business center.” If that’s as good as it gets in this country, you can imagine what I’m living with down here in Port Harcourt. Then there’s the fact that basically no one I know has a landline…mostly because it seems the telephone companies periodically show up saying you owe them, like, a few jillion dollars for calls you pretty much never made. Or the fact that, despite their relatively small size (I think I’m gonna have to downsize them even more, though…), I have to load these photos up one at a time onto the blog, since dialup connections (wifi at that, for the above-mentioned reason about landlines…) are more or less nonexistant here. So anyhoo, memo to Nigerian Communications Commission: try putting more effort into your work product, and less into your nice-looking building. It is rather a nice-looking building, isn’t it? And just around the corner from the Hilton, hey!
…two more images did make the transfer intact: above, an Owerri sunset taken from the hotel room in which I spent my first night in Nigeria, since my flight from Abuja to Owerri landed too late to make it down to Port Harcourt before dark. Below: me at dinner one evening recently. Don’t I look like the happy little guy I am? 🙂
…Against all this, it almost seems incredible that smiles come so readily to Nigerian faces. An international survey in 2003 announced that Nigerians were in fact the happiest people on earth. The important role that relgion plays in everyday life is a major factor, along with the natural entrenpreneurship of one of Africa’s best-educated populations. Ill-served by repeated governments, Nigerians have had to learn to survive. As Fela Kuti sang, “we suffer and we smile.” This resilience holds the best key to Nigeria’s future.
OK, peeps, here they are: the final pix and entries you’ll be seeing for some time. We start with photos taken in the latter stages of my cross-country trek in late May: these were all taken at rest stops in Colorado and Utah, aside from the beautiful sunset shot just below, which was taken from the moving vehicle just north of St. George, Utah, the evening before my arrival in LA. Driving across the US is almost always a pleasure for me — it’s so big and beautiful, and I’m sorry I didn’t get the camera out earlier to record tornado-laden thunderclouds over the great plains; wide, generous streams running through green grassy fields in the midwest; my beloved alma mater of Oberlin; or the great long weekend Steve & I spent with Heather in Pittsburgh seeing operas, exhibits and plays. I’ve got one month of vacation left, and I plan to shut down completely in order to be fully rested before heading off to Port Harcourt, Nigeria, which is my next planned assignment. (Assuming nothing changes, viz dental nightmares noted below…) Wish me luck, take care of yourselves, enjoy the pix and texts, and drop me a note when you can.
(so much world, so little time....) 
