Tragedy and comedy

Humor is often best from the inside, I'm obviously an outsider here, but when a local cuts loose, it can get hilarious, like this guy does. It all started when the government budget was revealed to contain funds for fuel for generators at overseas embassies. Laugh along as this author runs with that idea in: Nigerianizing Nigeria's Embassies. And of course it's funny because it's just so true. Enjoy.

Not doing so well

Not today. I just talked to my buds at a previous job and they were just in the process of shutting down the computer system that I had established and nourished at that company. This was not a small thing, three large systems separated between two buildings with active/active failover tested every 6 months. And it worked, and it wasn't easy to setup and I was proud of it, and I put my heart and soul into it and now it'll be gone.

On the domestic front things are deteriorating too. Reports from yesterday of police stopping oyibos in V.I. and demanding documentation. My documentation is in the safe and never brought out and besides it's not really valid because it's a temporary letter issued while the permanent card is pending. The letter has expired and the card has never arrived and it never will and I'll get another temporary letter and the card will never arrive and that's the way it's always been.

Besides which, an Agip helicopter was fired on wednesday with one crew member severely injured and the airport electronics staff (read landing radar) are on strike and now look at this.

Some helpful oyibo sent out the results of a salary survey from last year including company allowances for drivers and other staff. Now the union is circulating a letter accusing all us oyibos of paying only 10% (tithing) of the allowances and making millions off the domestic staff. Well, it's not really true, but it makes a nice biblical argument that folks who get their learning from church can grab onto. And it moves the argument from the realm of logic to religion where we can never win or even make a case.

Sigh. One more day and then on the bus, to the airport, into the lounge, and on the plane. "Doors to automatic and crosscheck." Ahhh.

International Misunderstanding

It might have been my fault that I misunderstood the housekeeper when I heard her say that the wife had told her to be sure to clean where the shoes are lined up and corrected her that she should actually pay attention to where the suitcases are stored but she (housekeeper) had really meant that the pair of shoes my wife had given her would clean up nicely but she'd rather carry them now and wear her flip-flops home.

What can I do? It happens over and over again, I misunderstand by applying my (limited) knowledge about what's actually going on to what I thought I heard. Might make a good sitcom, sort of Fawlty Towers like with the interaction between Basil and Manuel.

Like yesterday, when I had promised that same housekeeper that the driver could take her and some of the leftover wood from our packing crates over to the roundabout. (The crates that our shipments come in are amazingly well made and the wood highly prized.) There was just a little problem of which roundabout I had agreed to. I had heard Jakande (jah-kahn-dei) but was thinking Jankara (Jan-car-ah) and was wondering why they needed to go so far. After some explaining, I got the idea that it was to be just the first roundabout so that wouldn't be a problem for getting the car back in time. Fortunately it all worked out, although I'm still unclear about who actually went where.

I have to keep relearning to just let things work themselves out. I have learned (mostly) to stop worrying about the car. I can get out at the store in the most horrendous traffic jam with full confidence that the driver will find a place to park and be waiting when I emerge. Or I can direct him down a maze of narrow crowded potentially one way streets with every confidence that we will get through successfully. (The one wayness decided arbitrarily by the local policeman based on several unknowable factors including his desire to have some money for lunch.)

Am I the only one who noticed that the seats on that Pan Am flight in the movie "2001" look remarkably like today's airline seats, complete with the flat screen TV in the seat back? Whatever, I'll be off on the silver bird back to the "states" Sunday morning and will stay for most of March so I can be baffled by that culture and just as I am getting settled in, be ready to come back for more misunderstandings.

Read it in the news

Sky news has been running a story from the UK about a broken TV that was taken to a recycling center and ends up in a dump in Nigeria. Toxic waste is a serious problem, but this isn't reporting, it's entertainment. It seems that the organization Greenpeace took a TV and disabled it, then fitted it with a GPS/cell phone tracking device and dropped it off at a local recycling place. They claim to have tracked that exact TV all the way to the Alaba market near Lagos where it was destined to be broken up and the toxics released.

There's a couple obvious problems with the reporting on this story. First of all, Greenpeace is not an unbiased media outlet, they are out to push their point of view and Sky news neglected to mention that Greenpeace had fed the story to them. Secondly, can GPS or cellphone work inside a metal shipping container? No. There seems to be something more they are not telling us here, how did they really locate that TV?

But there's something more here. If you watch that video, it's shot to express the feeling that "you are in Africa now, everything is bad". The traffic, the piles of monitors, the jostling, it's focusing on all things that are unsettling to westerners. They show a tiny fire, is that the source of clouds of toxics or just something the producer needed? Then they add the closing shot of an LAWMA (LAgos Waste Management Authority) truck and pan across a seemingly endless waste dump, one that has nothing to do with electronics.

This is not reporting. It's producing a mini-movie for emotional effect. And it drives me crazy.

It's easy to take pictures or film to make a place look bad. Like these examples from the National Geographic. Or this from CNN, that was later shown to contain a pastiche of years old footage.

See above picture for happiness and hope for the future.

Badagry

Took an trip yesterday out of town to the historic village of Badagry. Historic for being "founded" by the Portuguese around 1425 AC and then later being a hub of European activity including the slave trade. It's hard to say "founded" when what actually happened was that some locals were living there, presumably happy, and some white guys in ships showed up and moved in. Maybe should say the Portuguese "moved in" in 1425.

What a nice little town. Clean and tidy with friendly citizens, we were glad to be out of the chaos that is Lagos. A modest but well kept museum with a knowledgeable guide introduced us to the history of the area. The museum building was built in 1863 with iron columns imported from Liverpool.

Other points of interest included the site of the slave market, which featured a shady bench where I could relax with some locals. A memorial to the first Christian missionaries, a huge Obama campaign poster, the first two story building in the country and the trail taken by the slaves from the market out to the coast to be loaded onto ships bound for the New World. We walked that trail, after a boat ride from town, then across a sandy island. That is really spooky, I was imagining how it must have felt to be a young African, plucked from the bush, in chains, seeing the ocean for the first time and being jammed into a square rigger.

We had had a pleasant lunch under the trees in a park alongside the lagoon before that hike and could have sat there all afternoon on our return, but time was pressing and we needed to get back on the road. Four hours from there back to home. Pretty reasonable at that time of day for the 50km for us old hands, a bit much for our fresh fish.

In a related mind boggling development, Marion Jackson, former member of the Jackson Five and brother to Michael recently visited Badagry and is proposing a multi-billion dollar plan for a resort/slavery theme part/Jackson 5 museum complex. It's all true, our guide insisted that he had met Mr. Jackson just a few days before.

"Mommy! Can we ride the slave ship again? Brother kept pulling at my shackles and I didn't get any gruel!"

Hopefully, this idea will fade away as with other recent grand plans for the area and leave this peaceful backwater as it is.

Sometimes a taste of home

They say that a certain odor can trigger a memory, I'm also sure that a taste can too. I'm not feeling too homesick, but last friday on my shopping, at the Falomo bridge, the lady showed me some pears and I just had to buy. N100 each so I took five. Did I ever tell you that I grew up in a pear orchard? At our first house, the far back lot was planted in pears. We moved out of there when I was 6 so I don't maybe remember too much detail, but I did learn to love a good pear. They were pretty hard, which is good, a pear needs to be picked hard and then ripened or else they become mealy. I've been checking them each day with a slight squeeze and decided today is the day. What a treat! Soft and sweet, maybe not perfect, but a special taste of home.

Maybe this need has been building up. On Saturday, I had made spagetti for our neighborhood dinner and then last night got up at 01:30 to watch the Daytona 500. I'm not much of a NASCAR fan but there is something comforting about listening to Darrell Waltrip and company, such an American sound. And that Junior guy caused a crash and was really annoying in his post race comments, just like he's supposed to be. All's well on that front, perhaps we should have post race fisticuffs as well to entertain the fans.

We all look the same

“I’m sorry, what’s your name?” I'm confused as usual. They all look the same. Coming from a place where being black was rare, it was easy to remember people's names, that black guy, that’s Tony. But when everybody is black it just doesn’t work. You really have to look, and if you do, then you can start to recognize people.

It's the same for the locals, they have a hard time telling us apart for the same reasons. When I go to the Lekki (Ilasan) market, there is sure to be a small who comes up and says “Hello sir, how are you, I remember you from last time.” He probably remembers some white guy and since one is as good as another then what's the difference? But I do meet people who really do recognize me, and it's always a pleasure. Except when it's the helper guy at Park and Shop who I should have dashed last week for taking the shopping to the car but the smallest note I had was N200 which was just too much so I didn't.

On the other hand, the guy who sells antique coins and stuff does know me. I’m maybe the only one who stops to look. Although lately, since I don’t buy anything his greetings are not as warm as they used to be. Yes, the Biafran coins are historic and interesting, but what would I really do with them? He’s got banknotes too, can you imagine a country that lasted only three years had it’s own money?

I am also vaguely interested in the windup gramophones that pop up from time to time. I can just picture some missionary in a village in the jungle winding the thing up and playing a hymn for the congregation to sing along. Then I notice the record on the turntable is "Shine" by Benny Goodman. I wonder what they were doing in the jungle to that music?

Demolish your problems

Last friday I was shocked to see that all the shops and shacks were gone from both sides of the Lekki expressway. And it wasn't like they had been carefully removed, they were now just piles of scrap lumber and rubble. A bulldozer had arrived and just started knocking everything down. The bike shop at the roundabout was gone, there was a pile of crumpled up bikes in the bushes away from the road. The decorative concrete place, which featured pillars for your house and statues for your garden and had an amazing sculptured doorway in the form of a lions mouth was just a pile of broken up concrete. A few shocked shop keepers picked disconsolently through the debris. The pet shop owner was sitting in shock with two puppies in cages that he had saved.

There have been been several such demolitions recently of areas deemed unmodern, for example the Oshodi market. Our state governor has stated his intention to clean up the city, but at what cost? Destroying poor peoples livelyhoods and housing? It seems most people think these actions are praiseworthy but I don't. You can read the governor's ideas here. The government talks about building new orderly markets but where are they? Everyone knew that those shops would have to go when the widening of the road got to that point, that's years away, couldn't that time have been used to do things in a better way?

Informal/casual trading is a key part in the process of bringing people into the economic system. For someone with little money, how can they get started? Only at the bottom, can they afford a market stall? What they can afford to do is to buy a big sack of potatoes, divide it into small bags and sell them on the street. That's how the street corner sellers near Goodies got started and now this is my favorite place to buy produce.

Isn't it better for these people to be selling potatoes rather than shaking down Okada riders or robbing truck drivers?

These problems can be handled in better ways. Like when the government cleared off Bar Beach for the breakwater project, there was an identified location for the traders to go to, and now that location near the Falamo bridge is a thriving market. In the recent events, the keepers of the demolished shops, left with nothing, have to fend for themselves.

Economy and me

So let me get this straight, our economy is based on loaning money to people who can't afford it, that they use to buy stuff they don't need, from another country that can't feed it's own people but can make lots of plastic crap. But not to worry, it's all backed up by a house that's 100 miles away from their job but it's worth plenty, believe me.

And the gov'mnts response is to lower interest rates and give money to the banks to lend more money and keep this circus going? And now we're in trouble because we are saving what little we have left? I just can't bring myself to spend.

Need a job? Here's one for you. For some unknown reason there has developed a need to resurface the tennis court in my compound. Well, there is one lady who gets a lesson occasionally and Bob played one night after the lights got fixed. Starting Monday a couple guys with hammer and chisels started banging away at the surface. Yesterday they brought in a big sledge hammer to break it up so the chiselers could remove the top layer.

After a week, I figure they're about half done on the breaking part. Sorry, but when I went to take the picture the 8 guys had gone off under the shade to nap like any reasonable person would do in this heat. You can't really see in the picture but the shady areas are mostly done.

Waiting this afternoon for the new driver, Jesse, to take me over to the office for the "Fat Boy Run". He's been getting checked and tested and screened, I hope he gets my jokes. Makes the traffic jams easier, at least for me.

At the beach

As Jake leaned back in his chair the legs dug deeper into the sand. This new bar was nicer, anyway the other one, no more than a shack had been swept away in a storm. The plastic tables were lined up on the sand with chairs awaiting the others. The ocean was dark and rough as he gazed toward the horizon pocked with ships waiting to enter the harbor. Lei was the only other one there, chatting on her cell phone about someone, presumably a man, who was evil, bad, and not to be trusted. Bad enough that her friend needed to be told several times. The others would be coming along, Jake had taken the shortest route, tired on a friday evening and not being interested in being bathed in sweat, just looking to get to the beach, enjoy the view and have a beer.

The tide was really high tonight, the biggest wave lapping right up to the leg of the table, the steep beach swept mostly clear of the usual trash. There had been talk at the start of last weeks run, some people had seen one or two bodies that had been swept ashore. Victims of unnamed, unseen violence, thrown up onto the land by the tide. One could construct a feeling of menace in the low clouds and increasing dusk.

Carolyn came in, the first of the medium route runners, looking pretty fresh. She had mostly walked, and taken the road instead of trying to follow along the steeply sloping beach and it's loose sand. As the other runners dragged in, the long distancers soaked in sweat, Jake pulled at his Gulder. Lei was off the cell phone now and explaining to someone how she was so busy with her clothes design business.

There was talk of the upcoming marathon, a few were planning on entering, the prize money was good, $50,000 for the winner, good enough to attract enough Kenyans so that no locals had a chance. But that money would bring out a big crowd, even some hopefuls in flip flops who would shoot out ahead and exhaust themselves in a sort distance.

"Have you ever noticed that stall that sells the used flip flops? Along the road as we come out here." Lei asked no one in particular.
"That guy repairs them too. My driver said that for N20 he can fix a broken strap good as new."
"I suppose the raw material is free, just walk along the beach when the tide has gone back out and grab as many as you can."

Jake had noticed a barefoot man, walking along the beach, out of the lights of the bar, with a bundle of some prize findings balanced on his head. The boom box blared "Girl from Ipanema" from inside.