This is the second of my email dispatches from Nigeria, copied and pasted below:
Hi all,
Having been here for about three weeks, I’ve gotten accustomed to taking cold bucket baths in the dark, having a working refrigerator only about 5 hours of the day, seeing amorous goats frolicking and rooting through our trash can for food, and having giant mutant bugs all up in my business. However, the lack of internet has been driving me batsh*t crazy. Yup. I can do without creature comforts, but a life without internet is a life not worth living.
This email dispatch may seem full of negativity. I don’t mean for it to seem that way. You see, these are actually the issues that have been weighing on my mind and soul most heavily, and so I need to get them off my chest before I can focus on the positive. Let me just say that I’ve also experienced joy, friendship, amazing sights, delicious food, and a sense of community, and I plan to elaborate on the positives further in the months to come. I would not trade my experience here for anything.
On Riots in Nigeria
On Tuesday, I was in a pickup truck with 4 of my coworkers, heading back to the office from a trip to the state capital. We passed by the wreckage of a terrible accident on the expressway. With horrified expressions, we speculated as to what could have happened. Then we came across an empty bus that had been parked sideways on the highway as a roadblock. Our truck and the other cars on the road were forced to take a detour into town. As we approached an intersection, we saw maybe 30 young men, yelling and wielding large sticks, disrupting road traffic.
“What the hell is going on?” one of my coworkers wondered aloud.
Then the men spotted our vehicle and rushed over to us. They started pounding on the windows and beating on the truck with their sticks.
“Give me your keys, and get out of the car.” one of the men ordered.
My coworkers started protesting, “What is going on? What do you think you’re doing?”
“Open up!”
The men then proceeded to open all the doors themselves and force my coworkers out of the truck, grabbing the keys from the driver. Unfortunately, as the truck’s door locks were manual, my coworkers were not in the habit of locking their doors. My door was the only one that happened to be locked (thanks to my overly neurotic, worst-case scenario tendencies, which came in handy that day). I was sitting behind the driver’s seat in the back. One of the men tried to reach around the driver side door to unlock my door as well. I pried his hand from the lock and kept my hand tightly on it. I refused to budge. I just stared straight ahead, not moving a muscle, praying silently to some higher power, my heart pounding against my rib cage. Luckily, the men didn’t persist in trying to remove me from the truck. I sat, observing the action and hoping that all of those reassurances that I gave my parents about my safety would not be proven wrong.
“The state government, they killed 6 of our lecturers!”
“Our university has been closed for 3 months now.”
“Some of us were supposed to graduate, and now our education has been wasted.”
“We need to send a message to the government that we won’t take this anymore.”
My coworkers pleaded with them, trying to make them see reason.
“We don’t work for the state government.”
“Then why does your truck say UN Development Programme?”
“That’s the United Nations. It’s an international aid program. We don’t work for the government. We work to help bring poor villages out of extreme poverty. We are on your side. We are with you.”
“You are not with us!”
And so it went. I sat in the car and waited. I did not join the coworkers in talking with the men outside. As a “white woman” and a foreigner, I would only provoke their anger instead of assuaging it. It seemed like hours, though it was probably no more than 15 minutes. I observed the angry faces, the raised fists, the wooden sticks. One of the men stood nearby, watching me. I smiled at him, an involuntary reaction borne out of a desire to diffuse the tension somehow. He smiled back. I noticed someone else holding a box of matches, but I didn’t know why. Was he planning to have a cigarette?
Finally, the matter seemed resolved. The men let my coworkers back in the truck after being convinced of their good intentions. One of the men jumped in to help navigate the truck to a road that would lead us back to the expressway. As I looked back, I saw black plumes of smoke rising from a car tire they had set on fire. We came across the rather inefficient police about 10 minutes away on another road, unaware of the situation. My driver said, “There’s a mob of angry men in town that set up a roadblock to divert traffic, and they just molested us. Please do something!” He was met with vague assurances, and we drove on.
A few minutes later, one of my coworkers remarked, “I think they only wanted to be heard. I don’t think they would have hurt us.”
Another replied, “I think it’s good that we got out of the car and tried to talk with them. If we had tried to drive on, they would have reacted even worse.”
“Yes, but they probably would only have set the truck on fire. Not harmed us. ”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
We drove on. Dr. Gbenga said, “Rosalyn, I was so impressed by how calm you were.”
“Oh, believe me, my heart was all in V-tach.”
“It didn’t seem that way at all. You were so calm.”
“Well, as I said before, every day here is an adventure.” Everyone in the car burst out laughing.
Later, I found out that the crowd of angry men were university students whose university had been closed for 3 months, due to lack of payroll funds (unfortunately, an all-too-common phenomenon in Nigeria). The professors had not gotten paid or were getting paid too little. As the situation was becoming untenable, and students were clamoring for the school to reopen, the professors had set up a meeting last week with the state government to discuss pay, with the intent of reopening the school. On their way back from the meeting, their van got into a horrific car accident (the one we had passed on the expressway), and 6 of the professors were killed. The university students were livid, claiming that if the government had been paying the professors in the first place, this meeting would never have occurred, and this tragedy would never have happened. Hence, it was the government’s fault. Circuitous logic, yes, but grief makes us cast blame where it does not always belong.
On Indentured Servitude in Nigeria
I have become fond of an 11-year old girl, Bidemi, who lives in my apartment. She is from a poor family of farmers in a village far away and is currently a domestic servant (slave?) to my flatmate Mary and her two young children. Although she does attend school and is clothed and fed, she gets up at 5am to do almost all of the chores around the house (including fetching water from the well) and to watch over the kids when Mary is not home. She spends almost all of her free time doing work. She is beaten or flogged with a wire for minor infractions, such as a missing sock. She is criticized and yelled at constantly. She sleeps on the hard concrete floor without even a blanket or pillow, while Mary and her two young daughters sleep on a mattress. Bidemi doesn’t receive any money for her services, and she is often denied things (such as detergent for washing her clothes), because “you are not my child.” I had to give her some of my detergent when she ran out. She is expected to fend for herself, an impossibility. She has virtually no possessions of her own. No books, no music, no toys, no crayons, nothing. I feel terrible for her, and the neighbor upstairs even yelled at Mary for treating this girl so badly, saying that Bidemi is still a young girl, and that Mary needs to be watching out for her development. It’s shocking to me, because Mary professes to be a very devout Christian, and she has been so kind to me. But I’ve lost respect for her after seeing how she treats Bidemi, who is the shyest, sweetest, most polite girl I’ve ever met.
I’ve been treating Bidemi extra nicely, giving her biscuits and food whenever I can (for which she always thanks me with a smile and a curtsy). She loves to read, and she has been reading Alice in Wonderland on my electronic e-reader. She wants to be a lawyer and travel the world. She thinks the soundtrack to the film “The Piano”, which I played for her on my laptop, is beautiful. On a few occasions, I’ve let her sleep on my mattress, because I couldn’t bear the thought of her sleeping directly on the concrete floor in the next room. We had been spending lots of time together, and she teaches me words in Yoruba and tells me that she misses her family. I secretly gave her 50 Naira last week so she can buy breadballs at school (each breadball costs about 10 Naira, equivalent to 6 cents each). Bidemi has taken a liking to me and offers to wash my dishes or clothes (as she does all the dishes and laundry for the rest of the household). I’ve resisted her efforts and instead have offered countless times to help her with her chores, though she usually doesn’t let me. Yesterday, I helped her fetch some water from the well. Today, fed up with the extreme level of responsibility she’s forced to bear, I just grabbed the dish sponge and started on the pots and plates, allowing her only to rinse them and put them away.
I worry about this girl, and I find myself in turmoil over what to do. There are no child protective services here. What do I do? Do I let the neighbors upstairs know what’s going on? I have a feeling they already do. I feel like the kinder I am to Bidemi, the harsher Mary is to her. Already, Bidemi is spending less time in my room, even though I’m always inviting her in to read my e-book or play on my laptop. So many times I’ve wanted to say something to Mary. But how can I make myself heard in a way that will actually change the situation for the better, without Bidemi being punished? Yet I know that with my big mouth and impulsive nature, I will eventually say something. I will try to say it with tact, but eventually my thoughts will reveal themselves, because the guilt of standing by and watching Bidemi treated this way is becoming unbearable. I sleep badly some nights, thinking about this. Mary is oblivious to my discomfort, and today when she notices that my shoes have tracked some dirt into my room, she immediately calls Bidemi to wring out my bedsheets and sweep my floor. I protest, “No, please just let me do it myself.” “Let Bidemi do it.” So Mary and I watch while Bidemi labors, and I am left with a sinking feeling in my heart.*
On Transportation in Nigeria
There’s nothing quite like seeing Nigeria while riding on a back of a motorbike along dirt roads. Also, you can avoid potholes more easily on a bike, unlike that poor 18-wheeler that hit a massive pothole on the expressway (likely while driving at night) and flipped over on its side, spilling its entire contents onto the road (mostly glass soda bottles). I think the truck has yet to be cleared from the road.
On Corruption in Nigeria
Nigeria celebrated its Independence Day last Friday. It was a special day, deemed the Golden Jubilee, because it was the 50th anniversary of its independence from British colonization. And yet, it turned out to be a day marked by tremendous cynicism and violence, in which a bombing in the capital city of Abuja killed 14 people. Newspaper editorials decried the Golden Jubilee as a “celebration of failure”. Everywhere I went, Nigerians railed against the amoral leadership, the politicians who embezzle as much as they can and send their kids to schools overseas, while roads remain unpaved and unrepaired, and electricity remains appallingly inconsistent.
In my office, we had a party that was prefaced with a discussion question: “If you had the chance to move to the U.S., Germany, or South Africa instead of being a Nigerian citizen, would you?” My coworkers said they would choose to be Nigerian, and they gave eloquent speeches about the tremendous potential of a country with so much in terms of natural resources and human talent. They held up countries like Ghana and Cameroon as examples. If those countries could get their sh*t together, why couldn’t Nigeria elect some strong, effective leaders with moral scruples and a grand vision of what Nigeria could be? In private, however, several of my coworkers talked about their dreams of leaving Nigeria and moving overseas to the U.S., which they referred to as “God’s own country”, or to Germany. They were just too fed up with the high unemployment, the crime, the political corruption, the broken infrastructure, the expensive food prices, the universities that shut down abruptly because the professors weren’t getting paid by the government, the doctors who went on strike because of appalling hospital conditions in rural areas of the country, and so many other misfortunes.
Thank you for reading this, if you have. Writing this feels like a form of therapy. I’m sure this email dispatch has left you all in high spirits (pardon the sarcasm), and I’m sorry about that. In my next email dispatch, I will talk about the amazing work at the MV site in Ikaram, where communities are visibly being lifted out of extreme poverty. I have to say that even though I had been skeptical before as to how much could actually be accomplished for only $110 per villager per year, the MVP team here has done some extraordinary work in the face of very tough obstacles, and in only four years. In fact, the government is already working on scaling up the Millennium Villages Project to include hundreds of sites throughout Nigeria. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t a long, long way to go, based on my work in quality improvement in the health system here. But the efforts being made are simply superhuman. I accord my fiercely talented and hardworking Nigerian colleagues mad props for that.
