The Apinautica - Nigeria III

Continuing The Apinautica, this overlaps a little bit with what I already posted (the first four paragraphs)



Nigeria III

Thursday, April 4th, 2013 – “The King of Saki is looking forward to meeting you! He had heard many good things about your previous project in Ibadan and has been looking forward to your arrival for months!” John from The Organization tells me as we drive from the airport to the hotel. John is the same age as me, 30, and will accompany me on this project. He mentions that he had had to work as a volunteer at Non-Profits for many years before his resume was impressive enough to get this job. [this sentence feels out of place here but I don't have a better place for it and it seems worth mentioning that to get a good job in Nigeria you need to be able to work a good job without pay for years]

   I feel very flattered that a king should want to see me, and in the mean time, here is the literal princess still working in the hotel lobby. She is looking gorgeous in her elegant clothes, glittering gold jewelry, broad smile of brilliantly white teeth as she greets me and brown eyes sparkling confidently. She remembers me as if it had been just yesterday we’d last met. “We should hang out" I say, in awe of her elegance, her title, and encouraged my her sweet smile. But my rumbling guts and fatigued body remind me as ambitious as I may want to be, I'm in no state for socializing. "… maybe when I’m back from Saki” I add, making my exit. My friend the security guard appears to no longer work here, and the receptionist doesn’t know his number.

   The next day John picks me up for the domestic flight to Oyo State. He’s running on Nigerian time, which stresses me out, but surely he knows his country – we get to the airport at 3:00pm for the 3:00pm flight. Nope the flight has left, and there’s only one a day. But on the bright side, here’s my luggage arrived!
   I’m very frustrated, this project is sandwiched in before a project in Egypt so there were only 9 training days but now that’s been reduced to 7.
   “The King of Saki is really looking forward to your arrival!” Yes well. But there’s a bright side to another evening in Abuja, Princess Nwaji is keen to hang out, though I still feel very unwell. She’s happy to come chill with me in my room and watch a movie, though I still feel like an invalid and still have to keep running to the bathroom. I fear I’m not at my most charismatic. [I feel like I really owe it to the reader to write more of a scene here. I suppose it could be rather comedic. I don't really remember any funny details though of course one could just make them up, but I'm not feeling very inspired. I'll try to remember to come back to it some time in the future]

Saturday, April 6th - We once again arrive at the airport 5 minutes after the flight’s scheduled departure but that’s okay because it doesn’t depart for another hour. From there it takes four hours to travel 100 miles north through Nigerian scrub, zigzagging across the road to avoid the most enormous potholes. Finally we arrive in Saki. The guest house is in a quiet government compound surrounded by lots of space and trees. There’s a small welcoming party is waiting outside the guest-house which includes two or three people I had met last year in Ibadan.
   “The King of Saki has been greatly looking forward to meeting you … but he died yesterday.”

[okay this marks the divide between what was previously posted and what hasn't been]



Monday, April 8th – “Hi, so do you work for a university or in commercial beekeeping?” I ask the Chinese man in the straw hat, extending my hand, during the mingling after opening ceremonies. One of the officials during a speech had made reference to the two Chinese men, Mr Sān & Mr Sì saying they were posted here with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, a beekeeping technician and a fisheries expert. [For this name change I looked up what they call a "John Doe" in China and gave him the name ajaja. It basically translates as "Mr Three" and is not actually an uncommon name, in fact if there's multiple John Does they just advance the number and "Mr Six" is in fact the second Chinese man's actual name!]
   To my surprise the Chinese man turns his back fully to me and spits emphatically on the ground, taking the time to scuff it with his foot before answering pettishly “No university! Commercial beekeeping!”
   As I’m awkwardly trying to decide if I’ve just been insulted and/or what a good follow up question might be, someone else comes and asks him the same question.
   “I just answered that! Commercial beekeeping!” I make my escape.

   “What’s with the Chinese guy?” I ask a Nigerian friend a little later.
   “He’s been here for two years but the beekeepers rarely see him. He was a police officer in China, here he spends all his time smoking and fornicating with young girls. His colleague doesn’t even speak English or Yoruba after two years here.”
   “Actually speaking of smoking I never see anyone smoking here?”
   “Oh, yes, people smoke and do the other drugs. Usually they just do it where no one can see them.”

   Later that day we are going through some beehives, and Mr Sān is with us, in his pristine white suit. He takes out a grafting tool –a small hand-held tool like a dental instrument (indeed they are sometimes used) with a delicate spoon shape on the end for scooping a bee egg out of a cell and depositing it into an artificially made queen cup– and looks for a frame with eggs in it to demonstrate. He hastily looks at several frames, declaring they each contain no eggs. I look at one of the frames after he has and do see eggs but don’t say anything. Eggs can be very hard to see, especially on dark comb.
I’m careful to wait until later, when Mr Sān hasn’t recently been unsuccessfully attempting to do so himself, before I show the trainees how you can bite down on the end of a toothpick to make a spoon shape in the end to make a homemade grafting tool, and demonstrate it on some eggs.
Later we are discussing making the artificial queen cups one grafts the eggs into. Mr Sān eagerly exclaims “I will show you how to make them!” He finds a stick of the right approximate size, and whittles it a bit to optimize the shape and size. Wax is fetched and melted, He dips the tip of the stick in the wax, then in the water to cool it, and then attempts to remove the cup shape that has formed over the end of the stick but it always breaks.
I surreptitiously remind him, in a moment when others are distracted, that he has forgotten to dip the stick in soapy water first before dipping it in the wax, so it will be easier to remove. “Oh, right, right.” It is then successful.

   “What’s the width of a topbar for Africanize bees?” Mr Sān asks me on Saturday. In the presence of other people no less! He has finally become comfortable enough not to feel the need to put on a front of knowing everything. “32 millimeters, rather than the 36 European bees need” I answer happily. African bees are slightly smaller than European ones.



Monday, April 15th – As we pull up to the forest clearing where the beehives are, the beekeeper’s begin loudly grumbling and then exclaiming angrily. It takes me a moment to realize what they’re seeing: the boney white cattle of Fulani herdsmen.
   As soon as the cars come to a stop they’re pouring out like angry bees, shouting and throwing rocks at the hastily retreating Fulani. But the damage has already been done, the beehives here are already smoking ruins as if they’d been exploded. The raiders had lit fires under them and broken them apart to rob the honey.

Tuesday, April 16th – “There’s a problem with your visa, please step out of the car” the immigration officer holds my passport in one hand and fingers a large chrome revolver on his belt with the other. He’s tubby and wearing a white polo shirt, but backed up by half a dozen men in green camo with AK-47s.
I look at John, he’s getting out of the car so I do so as well.
   “What’s the problem?” John demands.
   “It says here he has a working visa but you said he’s a volunteer”
   “Yes there is no volunteer visa. If he has a visa to work for pay he can work for no pay!”
   “Well the company name isn’t listed on it.”
   “There’s no space for a company name on the visa, it never carries a company name!”
I’m a bit concerned with John’s rising angry and confrontational voice. Surely that’s not the tone to take with a gun wielding probably-corrupt bureaucrat in a remote part of a country where people get gunned down all that time.
We had had our closing ceremonies this morning and now we’re on the long road back to the airport in Ibadan.
   “Look, I’m not going to tell you how to do your job,” says John in a tone that says he’s going to do exactly that, getting right in the man’s face, “but you know there is absolutely nothing wrong with this visa and you need to let us continue right now!”
To my surprise the man backs down “You swear wholeheartedly that there is nothing wrong with this visa?”
   “Yes of course there is nothing wrong with the visa!”
   “Okay you may go.”



Wednesday, April 17th - I was able to catch up with Dayo from my first Nigeria project while in Ibadan the previous evening, and on arrival in Abuja I’m able to catch up separately with Whale and Yinka from that project as well.
   There’s an animal feed specialist from Hawaii and an environmental impact expert in the Organization’s office. The latter has just finished two weeks in Nigeria and greets me with “it’s good to finally meet you, you’re a legend!” followed shortly by “wait why do you have an Australian accent?”
That evening, feeling better, I’m able to go out to dinner with the princess, like a civilized person, and she attempts to teach me to salsa dance, in the balmy air of the outdoor restaurant under the strings of lights. I feel like James Bond, dancing with a gorgeous princess! Unfortunately, I may no longer be sick but I still have a shockingly bad sense of rhythm. She is very patient with my bumbling and at the end of the evening she slides her gold colored watch off her arm and latches the blue band onto my own arm. “Rolex” is elegantly etched on the watch face. ["gold colored" sounds awkward but I don't want to say it's "gold" because I'm pretty much as she's a dear and clearly is in fact wealthy, I don't believe she actually gave me a gold rolex. But who knows maybe she did lol.]
   “A gift to remember me” she says earnestly.
   Is it a real Rolex? I have no idea, but it’s value to me was as a gift from a friend. Perhaps I should have saved it for special occasions rather than worn it every day until one day I was completely submerged in a narrow canyon in southwest Turkey and the watch ceased to work.


God I needed a haircut

Nigeria Epilogue:
   Later this year (2013) I receive the “impact reports” the Organization does a year after the projects in 2012. From my first project, the community increased their income by 56% over the baseline established prior to the project, and from the second project 66%. I’m blown away. I did this??

   I (spoiler alert) haven’t returned to Nigeria in the ten years since. Princess Nwaji graduated a law school in London, returned to Nigeria and married and had a kid. Yinka, leader of the non-profit that hosted my first Nigeria project went on to address the UN about women’s issues, but then sadly died before turning 40, I have not been able to learn why. Everyone else I know has been doing well.

And so there you have it. As you can see, this being the third Nigeria project I've pretty much boiled it down to just the key little stories that are worth telling from the project. There's not a lot of scene setting, possibly largely because I was feeling like the whole thing was on track to be too long. The sections I've written this year I had estimated would be 22,500 words but have come out to 14,981, so I'm successfully being more concise, _but at what cost!_

(Original entry (it was all just in one))