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.