Six of one...

My Hausa is steadily disimproving. I guess Im a bit lazy about it but Im just not naturally gifted with languages. When someone speaks to me I always have to stop and think before I reply. Pressure! But Nigerians (huge generalisation ahead) just dont get this. Most Nigerians speak 3 or more languages (English, a major Nigerian language such as Hausa or Yoruba, and a local or tribal language that they speak at home). So my struggling to answer in Hausa makes little sense especially when I presume folks can speak good English. An okada driver was pretty unimpressed with me yesterday when I took minute to answer him in Hausa. But I cheered him up immensly by pointing out that I knew 'hankali hankali' (slow down) when he tried some daft maneouvre 2 mins later!
Myself, I have a similar intolerance of Nigerians and their calculators (generalisations continue). It seems to me that most Nigerians cannot add 250 to 350 without a calculator. Do we learn different things because different things matter to us? Is it just the innate laziness of an English language speaker? Or a crap education system that overlooks addition? I guess it might just be too much intolerance and too few jokes.

Library additions...

There are 2 industrial placement students working in the library with us at the moment. Industrial placement is a third-level work experience project that runs for 6 months. It has been great. Miss Mary and Miss Lubabatu are great workers (which I must admit I wasnt really expecting), and they have been happy to get involved with everything. Cataloguing, classification, making activity sheets. Its great to have some new eyes about the place; feels like a breath of fresh air.

Ciao...

Lots more goodbyes this month. It realy feels odd now that so many of my contemporaries are off; I miss the familiar faces. But thats the nature of living away I guess. And widespread addiction to facebook makes it easier to keep in touch!

A tale of two actresses...

Two Nollywood actresses were in the news here in recent months. The first inadvertently became a source of outrage when a telephone recording of herself and her boyfriend having sex was circulated around half of Nigeria. It was dubbed Nigeria's first porn film and provided fodder for many newspaper columns and radio chat shows. And this week another actress was convicted of manslaughter after she hit and killed a man while she was driving drunk. Despite pleading not guilty she was convicted and sentenced to 7 years. This story filled about 20 lines and has been quickly forgotten.
The tolerance levels for extra-marital sexual matters seems incredibly low. Homosexuality remains illegal and a recent case of a transvestite gathering seemed to draw vicious behaviour on itself by the police. Perhaps a clue to the mindset that would allow this can be seen in the current episode of everyones favourite soap - Superstory. A woman lives in turmoil as her oldest son (born out of wedlock) runs amok, unlike his brother who is making good grades and making papa proud. Anyone who knows their Shakesperian tragedies will recognise this phenomenon of the sexual sins coming back to haunt you. But surely not in real life.

If a tree falls in the forest...

Pop quiz...



You have ordered clothes. They are due to be collected on Monday. On what day should you go to collect the clothes?

• Monday


• Wednesday


• Friday fortnight

Ans: Monday. The clothes will not be ready on Monday but your appearance will remind the tailor that they are due. Going on Wednesday means that your existence shall be forgotten for a further 2 days. While waiting I have plenty of time to ponder on life's great mysteries. For instance, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? You see here in Nigeria no tree worth its salt will fall unless there is someone watching and badgering it to tip over. Why bother otherwise?

And Friday fortnight is still likely to feature in the whole clothes collection scenario.

Reforms...

Standing in the bank queue you have plenty of time to think about how you would reform the bank service if you could. Starting with queues obviously - the time it takes, the lack of actual queuing and so on. You ponder on the possibilities of introducing customer service measures - such as staff arriving on time, telling the folks waiting if there is a problem. In your head, you re-arrange the manner in which people would be served - the 6 folks that crush the counter at any time would be sent back into the queue. The waiting folks who become intimately aware of your business are scattered. The fact that you are in the withdrawals queue rather than the deposits queue already hints at your business but it would be nice if several people were not reading your withdrawal slip to ease the boredom. I reckon I could get this place in shape in no time.

But then what shape that that would be. Does everything have to be done the way it is done at home. I appear to be the only one hung up on the whole queuing phenomenon. Privacy seems to be less of an issue for everyone else.


Similar issues have come up at the library. Since day one I have struggled to convince librarians of the need to stay put in the library. All sorts of alternatives are in place - lock the books in a cage so that the students cannot touch them until the librarian turns up, lock the library whenever the librarian wants to take a wander about, have no resources to worry about... The possibility of a staff member spending 7-8 hours a day in the library rarely features. It coincides with another issue - library staff reading the newspaper while readers wait for it (notions of not reading it at all during work hours have long since been abandoned). So one librarian - in all earnestness - told me that his library really should get a daily newspaper as that would keep him in the library for longer each day.

So again the reform question - just how much should I try to change these libraries so that they are the same as home (spend your day in the library, read the paper on your lunch break etc). Is the Western mindset automatically better in some way? And what is the point if people see and experience the world differently here?

Should figure it all out any moment from now...

Jos...

Spent last weekend in Jos catching up with a volunteer who has just moved there. Jos is always fun cos of its cooler climate and relaxed atmosphere (for tourists at least). It was a bit of an oyibofest though cos a large group of European backpackers were on tour in the city. An unusual sight! Visited the museum again – they are pretty organised and the backyard pottery area could be very beautiful indeed. Was delighted to read about the goddess Onya whom women revered for keeping them safe. Bet folks could pronounce her name! Also got to visit Jos zoo which wasn’t quite the nightmare I was expecting. The cages seemed too small and there was no water to be seen in any of them, but the animals just seemed as typically lethargic as they do in most zoos. You could easily reach out and touch them – the gorillas stuck their hands out for peanuts. We werent brave enough to hand the peanuts over as we did we the smaller monkeys, but threw them instead. Dada gorilla was stioc in dealing with my bad aim and plastered a ‘just keep em coming’ expression on his face. The lax security brought unexpected benefits though and as we approached the porcupine area a boy jumped into their enclosure and gathered some yam remains to hurl at their door and wake them. One of them graciously lumbered from his den to feast on the peanuts we threw. Watching these nocturnal (and so blindish) animals sniff out the peanuts (bad aim again) and snap them open with their tiny front paws was fascinating.
Enjoyed Jos a lot and finished up with the rather surreal experience of eating icecream with two fashion-designers (one volunteer and one nice stranger who stopped to greet). Two oyibo fashion designers in Nigeria? Yep, definitely another surreal moment.

You make plans...

But sometimes you don’t manage to take everything into consideration. When we had some spare cloth left over from making curtains I decided to make some simple covers for the stone window sills. Didn’t anticipate that the geckkos would consider these to be to a cosy place to sleep (and poop). No consideration.

Sticking about...

Great news this week – my extension has finally been approved. Hurrah. This means I’ll be staying in Nigeria for 6 months longer than planned, until April 08. I was really hoping that this would work out as I don’t feel that the library can stand on its own two feet just yet. So hopefully this will allow us more time for training and strengthening the sustainability of the project. Ireland in Spring is a whole lot more inviting than Ireland in Autumn. Not necessarily because of the weather but because of the potential weather; the Irish are nothing if not weather optimists.