tsoro
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 18/Nov/2010 11:35, 34 days ago
Well, I certainly didn’t expect to be writing this today.  Having had a fairly lengthy period of placement time which brought me face to face with the experience of“birds build, but not I build – no – but strain, Time’s eunuch: and not build one work that breaks” I was preparing a pleading, whining self-justification for ending my placement and looking for something else to do for 12 more months in Nigeria.Instead, it seems that my role here can be completely reimagined and there’s a shot at making something useful out of this handful of dust.  So that’s exciting and gratifying and potentially – only potentially – something that might make me feel like I’m achieving something (along the lines of sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine – but isn’t everything?).To my surprise, and gentle disappointment, I still feel as utterly miserable as I have for the last 3 weeks while my charming organisation kicked me around while studiously looking the other way.  So here are some things that I hate right now about being here in general: just a list of gripes, really.  Obviously, these are private words addressed in public: thorns from the rose garden that are mine and mine only (see what I did there?  do you?).  But that’s the deal of this wretched song, as agreed in our very own chapter 17.- we have NEPA about 3 hours out of every 48, because our street’s transformer broke about 2 months ago and rather than fix or replace it (why should they have to?), the charming semi-privatised PHCN have hooked us up to share with another street (pity them, too).  So we have the chance of power every other day: and as power’s been pretty thin on the ground recently, that effectively means about 2 bursts of about 90 minutes each where you frantically plug things in, do computer-related work, and run around the house trying to see things while you have light (I think we went about 3 weeks without actually being able to see our bath – which turned out to be unbelievably filthy when the light actually worked).  This is a crazy whinge, given that this is about a million times more power than many volunteers (and Actual Real People) in Nigeria ever get.  But it’s getting to me nonetheless.  When I feel crap, I want to curl up and read something easy or watch some trashy film or something.  And none of that’s easy – and some of it impossible – without electricity, and particularly when you’re streaming with sweat so any surface you lie on for more than 20 minutes is squidgy and sodden.  I need to find new comfort blankets.- directly related to the above, but separate because it’s an absurdly big deal for me, is that anywhere you are in our house you’re about 10 metres away from at least 5 generators.  So the second NEPA goes off (and for about half an hour after it’s returned – the time taken for the owners to realise what’s going on) you’re surrounded by the shuddering thumping drone of what are probably lawnmower motors.  I find it inescapable and utterly overwhelming, and it certainly blocks out any possibility of doing any interesting reading because I’m bizarrely incapable of taking in or processing information when there’re lots of loud noises everywhere.- our water supply has become incredibly poor over the last few weeks.  We’ve had no running water at all for 2 days, and before that there was an intermittent trickle from which we frantically filled as many receptacles as possible.  The reserve tank belonging to our landlords, which they allow us to use in emergencies, is empty– and the well-type-thing in our compound holds only water which is – quite literally – black and stinking of shit.  You can’t clean, you can’t flush the toilet, you can’t wash clothes, you can’t cook anything that requires water.  Again, a shortage of water is more or less fundamental to life in Nigeria and it’s almost certainly character forming to live with it.  But another 6 months of this (until the rainy season recommences and we can collect it from the sky) might reform my character a little more than I’ll be strictly happy with.- our bathroom stinks.  This is partly related to the point above, but also to it’s close relationship with drains and what-not.  It’s permanently dark in there (unless there’s power).  And it’s home to a slow, stupid, but seemingly ineradicable species of fly.  Spray as much fly killer as you want; tip bleach over their breeding grounds; encourage spiders to build their webs.  There’s no getting rid of them.  As with everything else, unhappy toilet experiences are of course a key element of living or working in a developing country.  I did hope, though, that I’d be able to maintain some kind of order in our own home and that I’d be able to feel some measure of comfort in using my own bathroom – ever the happy preserve of a man with a book, seated calm above his own rising stench.- we have no table.  This should not be a big deal, and it certainly isn’t something I anticipated making me sad and angry and frustrated.  It’s certainly a good thing to learn about myself: that I can’t conceive of life without a table.  How insanely privilege does that make me?  I find it– not impossible – but endlessly awkward and tedious to do any reading (funtime Old English reading, that is: not gulping down gobbets of airport fiction) without a surface to write on, and balance the different books and computers and pens that are required for such business.  It also drives me crazy that there’s (almost) no surface on which anything can be put – so the surfaces that do exist are covered in books, paper and things from our placements (nowhere to put things at ‘work’ either), candles, matches, fruit, games, keys…all the paraphernalia of life.- given that I feel profoundly not-at-home in our house, it’d be nice to have somewhere to go where I can feel at home.  There’s the superlative Sea Breeze, of course, but one of the things that gives me an underlying sense of purposelessness here is that’s there’s basically nowhere to go and nothing to do that doesn’t involve drinking alcohol.  While this is fairly merry in a frothy, holiday kind of way, it basically makes me feel like I’m reliving my student years – which in turn makes me feel like I’m going nowhere and doing nothing.  I didn’t come here because I wanted to return to a pointless idyll of drinking and empty afternoons.  I came here– I think – to move forward in some ill-defined way.  And that doesn’t really feel possible.- like toilet experiences, this will probably receive a separate blog at some future point, but life in such a community centred world is (for me– a fairly massively introverted, antisocial person) exhausting and wearing.  Just once, I’d like to be able to walk round the corner to buy some beers without having to greet everyone, refuse to dash someone, apologise for not calling someone, be forced to learn some new Hausa words which I’ll forget by the time I’m back in the house, and be asked to get someone a job.  There’s obviously a lot of joy in such a communal existence: but when I’m feeling low, I want to be curled up somewhere as alone and quiet and distant as possible.  I guess that kind of misery is a luxury that only those brought up in the developed world can afford: unfortunately, that happens to be who I am.- as, I think, Ecclesiastes tells us:“everything is useless”.  I’ve griped about this before here, but there is a deep frustration in knowing that anything you do – even in a comprehensively revised placement – will be wiped out by the massive, entrenched, systematic corruption and selfishness that defines Nigerian politics.  Just as no-one in the UK can do anything once bankers decide to play their own pitiful maths games, nothing here (or almost nothing– I’m sure Jen will disagree with me on this given what she’s seen of community engagement) will survive the end of this pilot programme.  I’m pretty convinced that – assuming there’s no like-for-like replacement in 4 years’ time – I could come here in 2020 and see no differences in Kaduna’s schools.  I haven’t had a job I believed in for some time, but I think I always managed to convince some part of me that something worthwhile was happening along the way.  Here, so far, I’ve not found that consolation.--------------------------------------------------------------------------So there we go.  That’s a big long self-indulgent whinge.  Well done for sticking it to the end.  The thing is– is this all bad enough to go back to the UK?  It’s not like that’s a paradise: we’ve no home there either, and reading the odd report on the endless juggernaut of misery which is the current administration is making me angry enough at a distance of several hundred miles.  There’s evidently as little future there as there is here: anything that gets built up will be torn down again the second some tosser (I’ve deleted several stronger words there) decides to gamble some millions in the game he and his chums play: there is no more economic security in Britain, and there’s no question about who will pay this time, and the next time, and the time after that.And me coming home (which I think I would do in an instant were it just about me) would mean making Jen come home, too.  We agreed before coming that if either of us were utterly miserable here, then we’d both come back.  But how miserable am I, really?  Is it that bad?  Will I just wake up one morning and find that I don’t mind it that much, and that I can live with knowing that at least half of my nights for the next 12 months will be sweaty, noisy, and dark?  Am I just chasing my tail, anyway, looking for some unspecified level of fulfilment that I won’t find anywhere no matter how much I moan? – is it me building a hell in heaven’s despite and finding comfort in blaming Nigeria (an easy target, after all)?  Maybe‘Resignation’ is about me when it says: ‘him bið a sefa geomor,/mod morgenseoc’ (he is/will be always unhappy in his mind, his spirit sick at break of day). I do hope not.