Caboose

I stayed with Kay at her house in Kubwa (one of Abuja’s satellite towns) last night. Mary joined us for a lovely meal and to watch a DVD. Although most of the rubble has been cleared up you can still see the scar’s resulting from the recent demolitions in Kubwa. Opinions are still divided over how good an idea it is to go around demolishing all the illegal buildings.

In the morning I headed down to the expressway junction to meet Alex and several others for a picnic up at Usuma dam. After some interesting driving through huge muddy puddles and into the bush (in a VW Golf) we found a nice spot and started the barbecue.

While we were waiting several local women walked past us, on the way to the reservoir to do their washing. A Fulani boy also turned up with his herd.

Around the time the food was ready it started to rain, getting heavier and heavier until we were all huddled in the cars. The Fulani boy stayed standing out in the open, watching the animals.

Tracey left Nigeria this morning, at the end of her two-year placement in Gindiri, Plateau State. While she was there she had a cat, which had kittens just over ten weeks ago. She needed to find a home for the kittens, so Marebec and I now have two of them. They’re called Tracey and Sue (after two of the recently departed VSOs), we can’t currently tell the difference between them, I think we might have to get collars for them.

Got a call from Alex this afternoon asking if we wanted to head out to visit Bwari pottery. Shortly afterwards he arrived with Tracey and Karen and Marebec and I joined them for the drive out to Bwari.

Bwari is one of Abuja’s satellite towns, with lots of housing and some government organisations there. The pottery was set up following the example of the Pottery Training Centre at Abuja (renamed Suleja when the new capital was created here). The buildings are of traditional construction, with grass roofs, and the site is very peaceful.

We watched one of the potters at work and Marebec had a go with his assistance.

There’s an interesting article about pottery in the Abuja area here.

After all the excitement of the Osun festival I needed something to do on Sunday (other than the washing). So when Alex asked Dave and I if we were interested in going for a walk we said yes straight away. Alex us and his friend Amy out of Abuja city, through a small town called Mpape to some local hills. It was great to actually do a bit of walking in the countryside, you could hardly tell you were just outside Abuja.

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Jo’s leaving today, so she wanted to make one last trip to Kabba and took Mary, Marebec and I along.

After an uneventful journey on Friday afternoon we arrived and received the usual warm welcome from Father Noel, then had a few drinks. The little plastic toy on Mary’s shoulder in the first picture is Nunzilla, she used to spit fire but since she was dropped on her head she’d not been the same.

Saturday started slowly as people gradually crawled out of bed and had breakfast, we then watched a couple of films and went for a walk up the nearby hill (which houses the local TV transmitter). The hill you can see in the picture is “juju hill”, a local religious site, outsiders are forbidden to climb it.

Bob, Ronan and Dave arrived on Saturday afternoon, so the drinking started again.

My colleague Tayo got married to his girlfriend Bisi at the weekend and I was invited to Akure to attend both the traditional engagement and the reception the next day.

One of the staff buses from FRCN picked us up outside Radio House on Friday morning and we all piled in for the (roughly) six-hour journey down to Akure, in Ondo state. The bus was much more comfortable than public transport, we had a seat each and it didn’t get too hot. We even stopped for a while at Lokoja, so I managed to get some fried yam and akara for lunch.

We arrived just in time to get changed into Nigerian traditional dress and walk over to the engagement ceremony with Tayo (the pictures were all taken by Jonah):

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I spent the weekend up in Kaduna, a couple of hours north of Abuja. We were visiting Paul, a Canadian volunteer who has been training teachers at the school for the deaf there. He’s finishing soon so he had organised a leaving party. Here’s a picture of Paul in his house and a random street scene from Kaduna.

Mary and I set off on Friday afternoon, took a taxi out to Jabi motor park and quickly found a bush taxi going to Kaduna. It was a pretty comfortable journey, they only put three of us in the middle row of seats rather than the usual four. As we approached Kaduna one of the windscreen wipers broke (it was raining a bit), so the driver switched them off and obviously couldn’t see very well. When Mary complained his solution was to speed up so the water was blown off the windscreen.

Paul met us at the bus stop and walked us back to the school, where he is living in a converted office. Tracy (from Gindri) and Karen (from Jos) arrived shortly after us.

Friday night was quite relaxed, we headed out to a bar called PDP (the same as Nigeria’s dominant political party, not sure why), had very spicy fish and chips and washed it down with a few beers. At the bar we met up with various other people, including Joanne (formerly VSO with FRCN, now with the BBC in Kaduna) and Henrietta (working with Marebec at FRCN).

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Karen (from Jos) and Jenny (from Akwanga) stayed over at our house after the Queen’s birthday reception at the British High Commission on Friday.

On Saturday morning we were sitting around the house after breakfast when Karen suggested we all go back to Jos with her. As the alternative was a day of washing and shopping we decided to go.

We travelled by taxi, bus and motorbike to Karu motor park, to the south-east of Abuja. The left-hand picture shows Karen, Jenny and Marebec at the motor park while we were waiting for our car to fill up. The other picture is a random landscape shot from near Jos.

Jos (short for “Jesus Our Saviour”) is the capital of Plateau State and has quite a pleasant climate due to its altitude (1295m), noticeably cooler than Abuja. Karen has a huge house but a very unreliable electricity supply, although we were quite lucky while we were there. After some shopping at the market, ice cream and a lovely pizza at a local Lebanese-owned restaurant we went back to the house for board games by candlelight.

Back in Abuja I had a huge pile of washing to do and some work to prepare for Monday, as well as the final of the “Paddy Cup” pool competition at the British Village tonight.

I back was up in Scotland at the weekend for the wedding of an old friend from University. I hadn’t seen Steven and Susan for about three years, we were all a bit surprised by how long it had been.

Here’s a photo of the happy couple, their bridesmaid and best man.

And here’s one of Susan on her own.

I’ve finally got round to downloading the pictures from my camera and uploading them here.

Here’s the reason we all made our way up to the village of Laide, Cat and Hen cutting their birthday cake:

Here’s the view from the garden of the house we all stayed at:

By the way, the island you can see so close to the coast is famous as a test site for anthrax as a biological weapon in the ’40s.

I’m not linking to the website for the house because the owner was an extremely obnoxious man (vaguely Fawlty-like) and I wouldn’t recommend the place.
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