Traffic

Motorbikes are everywhere. They always carry at least two people, sometime up to four. The passengers carry all manner of things – gasoline in 25L containers; a rolled up tin roof; a stack of chairs. Women also carry enormous trays of bananas and bundles of sticks balanced on their heads.

People walk along the side of the roads as there are no sidewalks. There are also no traffic laws that I can discern and no traffic lights and few stop signs.

The traffic tends to organize into cars in the middle, motorbikes closer to the outside, and then pedestrians on the edge of the road. There are no lanes. People drive on the right and traffic flows in two directions, but beyond that it is chaos. There may be two cars, two motorbikes and a few people occupying what would be two lanes in the U.S. As you inch forward, this might change to one car and three or four motorbikes and then to three cars and two motorbikes as everyone vies for a place on the road.

It is amazing that there are not more accidents. We were only in one the entire time that we were in Nigeria. This was in Lagos where our driver scraped another car. Both drivers looked at each other and acknowledged with a look or a nod and kept driving. Something so minor was obviously not worth stopping for.

My first thoughts on poverty

Port Harcourt, 22/2/2006

Yes, this is a developing country and you have to expect poverty when you plan your travel. It is another thing to see it and in such degree and volume.

Driving through the villages on the way to and from campus is amazing and depressing. It is amazing to see how people live with so little. There are small market stalls and people selling things in front of their houses. Sometimes it is just a few things – sometimes it is a stall which is full of books or motorbike tires, or square loaves of bread hanging in bags. It seems like everyone is selling something.

The poverty that we saw is incredible. There is little sanitation; garbage is placed in ditches by the side of the road or just beside the houses. Susan says that you can measure the economic health of a country by the way it deals with its garbage.

It is sometimes difficult to determine if a building is occupied or not as deterioration or a state of half completed construction does not affect inhabitation.

The area that we saw aorund Port Harcourt was the most impoverished that we saw in Nigeria.

Getting down to work

Port Harcourt University Library 20/2/2006 10:30 AM
It was good to have Saturday and Sunday to adjust to the time and the climate. It was rather boring, all of that time in the hotel, though. We could not go out for reasons of safety. There have been some recent kidnappings of oil workers in this part of the country.

This is the first day on the job. It started with meeting the vice-chancellor and many and many administrators. Communication here is very formal particularly the higher up one is socially. It would seem stilted and false at home but is the clearly the expectation here. Tea also seems a social necessity in meetings.

The librarians are very enthusiastic and ready for changes which is not what we expected based on the last visit.

We toured the library facilities and some of campus. We are driven everywhere. I think that they do this as a courtesy and to show honor to us. Outside of the campus it is a safety issue, but on campus we are even driven between buildings. This happened all over Nigeria, on every campus that we visited.

The campus has a new computing center which was funded by Shell Oil. It is very much the social place on campus.

The library is building a new building. This has been in process for 12 years. There was a lack of money and so construction stopped for something like a decade. The construction resumed, an second story was built and repairs done on the first story (unfinished buildings in the tropics are particularly vulnerable to decay). Then the bank holding the money for the project went under. The university will probably get the money back, but it is not known when.

Passport Woes

Port Harcourt 20/2/2006

My passport only got stamped for ten days. This is a problem. John was in line with me and his also only got stamped for ten days. But they didn’t tell him this, we only found it out when we got back to the hotel. I had a discussion with the immigration control person about my passport. Here is how it went.

I handed over my passport and was asked how long I would be in the country. I said three weeks and was told that I could only get a stamp for ten days. I said this was not correct, that my visa application had been for three weeks. I was told again, only ten days. I asked why. I was told that since I had a visa to allow reentry that I could only stay ten days at a time. I knew this was wrong but was not going to argue about it. Suspecting that this might be a ploy for a bribe, I asked what I needed to do about it. The response (which took me a while to figure out) was that I would need to take my passport to the immigration office in the city of Port Harcourt. I decided that Susan would have to look into this and gave up on resolving it at the moment. I wonder if I should have been more direct about asking if I needed to pay right there.

Susan initially thought that this was all because I was a woman and the immigration guy wanted to talk to me longer. This was disproved as a theory when we found the same problem with John’s passport. There will be more about this saga later as we work out obtaining the extension.

Who comes to Port Harcourt?

So, after 22 hours of travel, I arrived at Port Harcourt. It took at least an hour to get through immigration control at the tiny airport. It was interesting people-watching. There were three lines and we were divided up into oil workers, Nigerian nationals, and everyone else. The Nigerian nationals all had huge amounts of luggage in tow. The oil workers were mainly international contract workers for the refineries and rigs, a lot of them from the Philippines; and executives and engineers, mostly from the U.S. or western Europe. The third line was missionaries, embassy and consular workers, and NGO people. There really are no tourists in Nigeria. Especially not Port Harcourt and especially not given the current political tensions in the oil area of the country.

On the plane near me there were several people who were clearly with a government, probably the Nigeria government, a family that I thought was with the U.S. foreign service until I saw one of their t-shirts. They were Canadian missionaries. The family disembarked at Port Harcourt; the government employees went on to Abuja (the capital). All of the oil workers and execs deplaned at P.H.

I was intrigued by a woman younger than me who looked very exotic. I didn’t really see her face but she might have been Japanese or eastern European. She had long, straight dark hair and was wearing very stylish clothes. Too much really for such a long plane ride: long brown leather jacket, black skirt, striped tights, and brown suede platform boots. Clearly, she was meeting someone. I could not figure out her purpose for coming to Port Harcourt. Susan saw her meet a 70 year old man who mentioned to someone that he was his wife. There is definitely a story there.

Feeling Interstitial

O’Hare Airport 17/2/2006 2:20 PM

Sitting in Chili’s at the O’Hare Airport. They have a patio. That is, they have an open area that is on the walkway. It’s supposed to be a beer garden; this strikes me as oddly artificial.

William Gibson wrote that airports are interstitial spaces, neither one place nor another. When I travel alone, I really feel this sense of being disconnected from everyone and everywhere. Not perhaps the best way to start three weeks in a very foreign place.

It will be three weeks before I see my friends and husband (who were so good to see me off with breakfast this morning). I don’t know what the chances will be to phone or when I will have access to email.

thanks and thank

In the phrase "thanks, Jesus" he is being directly addressed: It is thanks to Jesus that we have gas.

It may have been "thank Jesus" - the sign went by quickly. In this case we are being told to give thanks - it is an imperative statement and an exclamation of thanks.

Nigerians are deeply religious and this sign was seen in the Southern (predominately Christian) part of the country.

Why "Gas, Thank Jesus"?

Nigeria is a resource rich county with an impoverished population. There are a multitude of reasons for this, more than I can list or understand: history of ethnic fighting, colonization, military rule, dictatorships; government and individual corruption; burgeoning population; desertification....

Nigeria is the eighth largest exporter of crude oil. The average Nigerian lives on $1 (U.S.) a day, which even translated into Nigerian naira and Nigerian prices is not much. Is not enough.

Nigeria is the third largest supplier of oil to the United States and has contracts with South Korea and China, among others. Nigerian citizens cannot afford their own export. A liter of petrol can cost $1. Nigerians do not even always have access to gasoline. Distribution, refinement capacity, and poverty work against a consistent supply. You see a lot of nice looking gas stations which are closed. They look like they were built and never used.

On the road from Ibadan to Lagos, I saw a handwritten sign posted to a tree

GAS
THANK JESUS

This summarized much of my Nigerian experience. It may be the most important story that I share.