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Aspirational Abuja

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.

Posted by  |  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.”

Posted by  |  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.

Posted by  |  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.)

Posted by  |  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!

Posted by  |  October 19, 2007 | Categories: Abuja, Nigeria | Leave a comment

Frustrated in Abuja

…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.

Posted by  |  October 14, 2007 | Categories: Abuja, Nigeria | Leave a comment

Mile 3 Market – Port Harcourt

Posted by  |  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.

Posted by  |  October 14, 2007 | Categories: Nigeria, Rivers State | Leave a comment

Arriving in Nigeria

…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!

Posted by  |  September 9, 2007 | Categories: Nigeria, Rivers State | Leave a comment

My Summer Vacation: Yoga Mats, Dental Chairs, Church Pews

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.




Posted by  |  August 3, 2007 | Categories: United States | Leave a comment

My storage space is now fully reorganized, and more belonging are being unloaded to those who need them more than I do, such that it leaves room for my bike and a few other items that hung out in the Shansi House basement at Oberlin and in my brother’s basement for the past two years (thanks, Deb & Carl; thanks, Steve).My various personal affairs and projects are wrapped up, t’s seem mostly crossed and i’s mostly dotted, so I feel I’m now able to spend the final month of my vacation purely and completely on vacation. Not that the past months haven’t been great, but there’s usually been some “work” mixed into the days in addition to lots of transcendant yoga classes, great tennis lessons, much-needed quality time with my great friends like Gary, Steve, Howard, Gene, Mike and so on and so forth.

In early July my friend Steve (one of the Steves) and I went diving with SoCal’s LGBT diving group out on Catalina Island. I’d never done cold water diving with a full wetsuit and hood before; despite the bulk of the gear, it’s well worth it as I hope these pix, all courtesy of Sharon and other members of the group, attest. Neal & Elizabeth: do consider going with me when you’re out here! 🙂




I’ve gotten fabulous ego rushes from all those people who seem to think my current career path makes me sorta special (why don’t cute guys like Matt Damon seem to think so, though?), and even finally had something that felt like a real date the other night. That was fun: holding hands in the movie theater! Since I didn’t get to do that in high school – at least, not with the guys I wanted to – it’s fun to make up for lost time now. The big shadow over my summer has been – and remains – my overly-frequent visits to the dentist’s office to deal with repercussions from a tooth I chipped while eating a guava in Sri Lanka in January. My lessons learned: if a dentist proposes anything major (and from my seven visits so far, I must say that crowns and root canals are major, NOT FUN, and EXPENSIVE), be sure to ask A LOT of questions, consider a second opinion, be completely confident that you know and trust the exact dentist who proposes it, ask questions of a few friends who’ve had similar experiences, and consider getting a second opinion before agreeing to it. I’m trying to get over my regret that I did none of the above until it was way, WAY too late…and I certainly won’t ever be going to this dentist again. Now I only pray that it’s all done and completely taken care of before it starts to affect my departure for Nigeria: please send up good energy for that to happen, one and all.

I’m the standing one, not the waving one, in case you couldn’t tell. 🙂

On the plus side, there’s been a glorious new addition to the spiritual side of my life that started to blossom when I found yoga teachers who pushed me to broaden my practice beyond the assanas. Thanks to Bruce & Jen in Indiana, and Shari here in Pasadena, I’ve been greatly enjoying as many services as I can take in at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Santa Monica. For any of you who’ve wished for a space where you can share your joy in life’s mysteries and magnificence without all the prescriptions, proscriptions and dogmas that seem to go along with most organized religions (not to mention that frequent requirement to turn your brain off and believe what someone else tells you blindly), I’ll say this: check out the UU congregation nearest you, whatever your faith background.


I’ll leave the introduction at that: there’ll be captions on some of the pics, and more about what’s next when the time comes. There are also a few pedantic and preachy texts about issues ethical, political, humanitarian and social down below. Feel free to skip those and just enjoy the pix. You all know how I need to vent every now and then; please don’t hold it against me. As always, thanks for the support, and spare a smile and kind word for someone you don’t know today.

Posted by  |  August 3, 2007 | Categories: California, Los Angeles, United States | Tags: | Leave a comment

Watts Towers






Posted by  |  August 3, 2007 | Categories: California, Los Angeles | Tags: | Leave a comment


Posted by  |  August 3, 2007 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

One summer highlight was Mom’s visit, during which she convinced me to take her to Watts Towers, which I’d somehow imagined to be a 1960s-era urban renewal housing project, like coop city. NOT! For more than thirty years, a relatively uneducated Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia single-handedly constructed and decorated everything that you see here – to thank his adoptive country for providing a home and a living, to atone for things he’d done that he wasn’t proud of, to express his faith, and/or for other reasons that we may never know. They certainly stand out in the low-income neighborhood of Watts.

Left and right here, you see some detail of the tiles and glass that Simon Rodia cut and placed meticulously to create the artistic effects he wanted. Mom particularly wanted me to include some photos of the green glass for our old family friend Florence Cole, whose husband worked many years with 7-Up — from which most of these bottles came, back in the days when all bottles were made from glass and polymers weren’t even a gleam in an inventor’s eye yet.




Posted by  |  August 3, 2007 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Island America

In history class, I learned that US history in the 19th and 20th centuries included several episodes of isolationist sentiment. One example was the American public’s unwillingness to get involved in what it viewed as a European war right up until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, years after the war started in Europe. What I find curious about the current context in the US is that our government has arrogated to itself the right to abduct citizens of other countries and hold them indefinitely at Gitmo under torturous conditions and without rights (such violations of basic rights are far, far worse than the injuries from King George that led colonists in Boston and elsewhere to revolt against England in 1776…and to start a military campaign that the traditionalist and more powerful British military viewed as ungentlemanly and rather uncivilized – the concept of terrorist didn’t exist yet then – in nature), to invade Iraq and Afghanistan despite, in the former case at least, very strong and legitimate international concerns about the invasion.

Mom and I also visited the newly-reopened Getty Villa, up on a cliff above the Pacific near Malibu; this museum now houses the Getty’s classical collections from ancient Greece and Rome, and reminded me after two years spent absorbing the wonders of China and south and east Asia that we westerners have much to be proud of in our history as well. All visitors to LA should have both the Getty Center (the more famous building) and the Getty Villa on their itineraries; both can easily be full-day or nearly full-day excursions, and are well worth all the time you can give them. And their cafes have excellent food at very reasonable prices – so why not make a day of it, with lunch in the middle!?

All this happens at a time when the average citizen in the US is so utterly clueless about the world in which we live, the history of American foreign adventures in the 20th century and how almost every problem we now face grew from seeds planted in earlier interventions full of hubris and ideas about projecting American power or democracy or what have you around the globe. (Hey, you want specifics, write me a comment and I’ll give them to you…but for a few quickies: we put down a democratic rebellion in Iran in the 1950s and installed the Shah, whose repressive policies led to later revolt and Islamic republic; it was the Desert-Storm stationing of American soldiers in Saudi Arabia that helped radicalize one generation of Islamic extremists, and American dollars to fund the anti-Soviet Mujahideen that started what later morphed, after the Soviet withdrawal, into the Taliban…oh, and for the record, we installed Sadam Hussein and his Baath party in power, back in the 1970s in Iraq, and supported him right up until the day he invaded Kuwait in 1990, although by that point he’d committed plenty of the kind of atrocities with which the Bush Greedmongers later tried to justify his invasion. And for those who’ve forgotten…GWB’s dad headed the CIA during some critical periods in the evolution of that US policy towards Iraq in the 1970s. When are we gonna learn that we have to stop trying to play God globally, and support meaningful international institutions that may not always do what we want, but will help build some global stability and consensus???)






Posted by  |  August 3, 2007 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment