The Agrinautica

   Alright so my work on the second chapter of the book about my travels had ben kind of stalled out since I started working full time in October. Initially I had had some other projects that took up my time on the evenings and then I'd forgotten the historical source material at a level of useful detail from the book I was most using (The History of Yoruba, published 1901 or so), but recently I finaly got around to rereading the relevant parts and then writing what I intended based on it.


   The overview summary of my goals with the chapter is that it's the story of my first project in Nigeria; trying to keep the narrative inertia going with overarching plot arcs pertaining to my anxiety tha the project succeed. There's also substantial historical fiction. I myself and I assume most Americans had this picture of Africa as more or less an anarchy of huts before colonization, and my goal with the historical fiction parts is to really portray to the reader that there was just as much of a society there before colonization as anywhere in Europe.

   This is my working copy of the first draft, so it still contains a lot of notes to myself. The blue parts will remain but be in a distinctly different font than the rest, the green is mostly notes to beta readers (well technically alpha readers at this point I think?) or myself.

   Some sections of the beginning of this have been posted here before, but I want to put this to readers all at once so they can read it in the context of itself, as it would be in the book. Does it go on too long, fail to hold interest, etc?

   Thanks, here is the link:

Chapter II: 9ja

   Okay this is definitely very first draft... in fact I literally just wrote it! and a voice in my head is definitely urging me not to post it until I've maybe had a few days to brew it up, but rather a purpose of setting out to post a bit every day was to compel myself to just get things written so here it is so I can see if I can try to continue moving forward tomorrow. And this could be divided into two scenes to be posted seperately, which would give me more time to work on the second part but I think they belong together.

Days 13-14 - Back in Abuja
February 25th, 2012 – “Hi Thomas, how’s it going?” I ask the hotel doorman as I return from having walked to some nearby shops..
   “Very well sir how are you?” he beams as he opens the door. I greet the receptionist at the desk and then I see Doug coming down the stairs.
   “Hey Doug!” we greet each other and sit down in some chairs in the lobby to catch up. Despite some major mishaps his project has gone well. The woman hit by the car had recovered and Blessing had been released.
   After we’ve thoroughly caught up Doug remarks “woo-wee that girl over there is pretty, have you met her yet?” indicating a very elegantly dressed young lady sitting behind a table in the back corner of the reception area, some kind of promotional posters are all around here. She had been there when we had first come through here two weeks ago as well.
   “No, I haven’t actually.”
   “Well, go talk to her!”
   “I, uh… okay” I sigh. I don’t make excuses to avoid a challenge is what I don’t do. It turns out Princess _______ is an actual princess, her grandfather is a king somewhere near Port Harcourt in the Igbo region of Nigeria in the south. She is presently engaged in selling luxury real estate in Dubai. Nigeria is a place where gorgeous princesses sell luxury real estate in Dubai in hotel lobbies I think to myself in wonder. I’ve heard it said that some people in Nigeria fly to France for lunch.
   Walking up the stairs to my room I find Anthony, the same guard who had been there when I arrived two weeks ago, standing in the stair landing, and we get to talking. He’s clearly bored out of his mind, so I linger and talk to him for forty minutes. His job is to stand tehre in the stair landing all night, eight hours, and isn’t allowed to sit down. As we talk it comes out that he lives near the famous Zuma Rock just outside of town, and he invites me to accompany him there in the morning. I have nothing on -- the organization scheduled three days in the capital for me to write the report that took me an hour-- so I take Anthony up on his offer.
“Meet me here at 7 he tells me.”

   In the morning I get dressed and step out of my room at 7:00 and there he is at the landing, exactly as I left him as if he’s been frozen in time since then.
He would normally take a bus home but we call a taxi. A short drive out of the city and the massive rock looms before us, nearly a thousand feet tall with sheer barren grey sides and a flat top, like an enormous recumbent elephant. Near its base Anthony points out a large hotel that he tells me was never used after being constructed due to the persistent belief it is haunted by the spirits of Zuma rock.
   We get out of the taxi near the base of the rock and walk up to touch it. Nearby some kids are tossing rocks at a mango tree to knock out mangos, and a family appears to be having a picnic nearby. They wave us over and offer us some fresh mangoes.
   We walk a short distance to Anthony’s village and he takes me to a man who makes palm wine because I had expressed an interest in it and hadn’t heretofore been able to find any. The palm wine is tapped from the crown of a palm tree by driving a small pipe in and collecting the sap that flows out as a clear but somewhat milky liquid. It tasted strong but not too bad. Since Anthony hadn’t asked me for anything, I bought him a bottle of palm wine from the tapper, before returning to the taxi to return to Abuja town.



Days 15 - Last Day
February 27th, 2012 - “And they made Kris a chief!” Doug is telling Dr Walter, an irrigation specialist who just arrived to start his own project.
   “Oh they made me a chief too, in Ghana I think” he chuckles. Later, as we’re both going to our rooms, which are on the same floor, we pass Anthony on the landing.
   “And this is Anthony,” I say, indicating my friend. Dr Walter looks at me as if to say “why are you introducing me to the furniture?” and I sigh. Dr Walter isn’t unusually haughty, but most people dont’ take much notice of the hotel staff.

   I need to think of a good replacement princess name obviously. If you happen to recall way back in the beginning there was a dream sequence with Anthony-as-the-founder-of-Abuja at Zuma Rock, and this is the part it links into. Also I want to work on "Dr Walter" because the brief details about him here make him just come off as haughty but really I think he was probably more contientous than your average person.

   Continuing the posting of scenes from the memoir. This is page 19 of 21 currently written pages of chapter II so we're getting towards the end of what is currently written... though it's the weekend and I hope to finish the chapter over the weekend, hopefully!

Day 10 - Waxing Eloquent
February 22nd, 2012 – “Now back home I have a specially made wax melter to melt wax and can order candle molds, but we’ll have to improvise. I have this manual another development organization put together which describes how you can put beeswax in a sack and submerge it in boiling water to render the wax….” I explain the method described while my audience listens politely.
   “Otunba, ….” one of the trainees addresses me once I’ve finished. He is older, his goatie frayed in grey, deep creases etched in his cheeks where wrinkles form from smiling. He is speaking Yoruba of course so I have to await Dayo’s translation
   “He says 'otunba, we have a better way to do this, let us show you.'” I enthusiastically agree, and the group sets about getting the necessary equipment and setting up just outside our metal awning. Some cauldron-like pots are somehow immediately produced and a campfire style fire of logs is soon burning. A cauldron full of water is set on some cinderblocks to be just above the fire and presently the water inside is at a boil. Chunks of wax are then tossed in, and it’s all stirred with a stick as the wax slowly melts. Presently the whole thing is soupy with what looks like bean casings floating on the surface. One doesn’t think of bees as making cocoons, but they do -- they’re just never seen because they’re embedded within the wax comb but they are separated out during the wax rendering process to become what’s called “slumgum.”
   Once everything in the cauldron that’s going to melt is melted, the contents are carefully poured through a mesh of mosquito netting into another large pot, which separates the slumgum and other debris. From this second pot it’s carefully poured into bowls. Wax being lighter than water we just pour carefully off the top and stop when it appears we’ve poured off all the water. Because the wax will naturally separate from water there’s no real harm in accidentally pouring water in with the wax. We’ve coated the inside of the bowls with soap so if the wax cools and hardens in the bowl we’ll be able to remove it. Some we allow to do this to make wax cakes useful for longterm storage or trading. Some of the wax we put into another pot to make a lotion out of. This is a very simple matter of combining the beeswax with shea butter and the pulpy insides of aloe vera leaves. Another thing we want to do was make candles, but we need a suitable mold.
   The participants and I scrounge around for anything we think might work as a candle mold. I had high hopes for a piece of PVC pipe but once the candle had hardened within it it couldn’t be cracked open without breaking the candle, and the pre-cracked pipe leakes too much. Two long fluorescent light tubes were filled and then shattered to make candles, which was effective though obviously not repeatable and wasteful of resources (though I assume they were already broken), but the two giant candles thus formed are enthusiastically dubbed the “otunba candles” by the class.
   And then we had a true candle-making breakthrough. The papaya plant it turns out consists of a woody trunk a bit taller than a person (the one’s I recall seeing anyway, though I read they can get up to 5 meters / 15 feet) from which green hollow branches emerge. These branches are about the width of a finger and can be cut to a length of about two finger lengths as desired for candles. Because the melted wax will leak out the bottom we firmly plant the bottoms of our molds in the sandy soil, and fill them with wax, with a wick of string suspended down the middle. Being plentiful, once we found it worked we could have as many of these molds in use at a time as we could desire. Once the candle had cooled, the papaya stalk is easily peeled off the finished candle.
   All this was more or less a fun novelty as candles don’t sell well in Africa, people do have electric lights and better things to spend their money on than candles, but everyone enjoyed the project anyway.




The Otunba Candle!

Day 6 - Field Trip
February 18th, 2012 – “Look at that development, you should take a picture of that” Hattrick urges me as we roll out of Ibadan past a tract of new cookie-cutter houses, each on a little square quarter acre lot with driveway and front lawn, just like America, very Norman Rockwell. I smile and take a picture just to be polite, digital film is cheap, so to speak. I know Hattrick is a bit concerned that I primarily photograph notable un-modern looking things and wants to highlight the more moern, but modern is boring to me.
We pass beyond the last suburban developments of Ibadan to find thick shrubbery on either side of the narrow paved road, with frequent cassava or yam fields -- rows of the straight leafy shoots of the above-ground part of the massive tubers. We drive, one landcruiser followed by one small bus of trainees, through villages of dull grey cinderblock buildings where the government has exercised its right of imminent domain on everything within fifteen feet either side of the road and just bulldozed through the structures that were there so every building has half a room fronting the road, stretching out its broken walls. We stop for a moment, to ask directions of a passerby near a crossroads in a village, which seems to be how one navigates here, and Hattrick gets out and buys something from a women frying balls of dough in a cauldron of oil by the road. He hands one to me, it’s sort of like a doughnut but a bit spicy, it’s totally delicious. I’m told it’s called a “popov,” apparently derived from “popover,” which may or may not be a similar food item in some part of the anglophone world as foreign and exotic to me as deepest Africa, such as maybe [googles] ... Boston. {the "googles" in square brackets is to actually occur in text ... while this is not}
   We arrive at our destination at an intersection of two dirt roads a short way off the paved road. The tree coverage isn’t quite a forest here but is thick enough that visibility isn’t far. In places there are more cassava plantations and the occasional person walking along, so it doesn’t feel like we’re in some distant uninhabited place. There’s a mess of cracked eggs at the base of a nearby tree.
   “What’s this?” I ask Hattrick
   “Oh it is a fetish. The simple peasants put them at crossroads like this due to their superstitions.”
   We suit up by the vehicles before approaching the hives. Most of the beekeepers have homemade bee suits that turn them into shapeless hooded figures, like a child dressed as a multi colored ghost for halloween. One man in elegant robes simply pulls his robes around him until he is completely covered. We then proceed the short walk to the hives. They are located in a shady area under some trees, though even here it is hot and humid. In a darker wetter glen just beside the hives some very large carnivorous pitcher plants were growing. I happen to have a kola nut in my pocket someone had given me and vaguely imagine if I dropped it into the pitcher plant it would become hypercaffienated and run amok.
   The hives are all topbar hives -- trough-shaped wooden boxes raised up on metal legs to about waist height. If you’re familiar with the box shaped hives ubiquitous in the US and developed world (“Langstroth hives), these are much more oblong. Some have sides slanting inward and some had straight sides.
   We don’t have a usual crucial piece of beekeeping equipment, a “smoker” consisting of a metal canister in which things smoulder and an attached bellows to puff the smoke out the tapered end. Instead we ignite dried corn cobs and other flammable materials in an old coffee can, and once smoke is billowing out the top one of the trainees dangles it under the first hive by its handle. The smoke billows vaguely against the hive. Someone flapps at it with a large leaf to drive it more towards the hive but I’m not sure much smoke actually is going in and having an effect.
   We open the lid and I am startled to see among the bees scurrying across the topbars over a hundred small beetles like all-black ladybugs. Small Hive Beetles! Aethina tumida! In the dry desert environment of California it was rare to see even a few hive beetles and seeing just two or three in a hive was cause for alarm. But this is their native land. Fortunately the bees here (Apis mellifera adonsonii) have co-evolved with the beetles and can handle them well, unlike the Europe-derived honeybees of America. If hive beetles overrun a hive it’s called a “slime out” because their maggot-like larvae overwhelm the hive and everything gets covered in a gross slime that is their defecation. This hive however doesn’t look like it’s suffering from the hive beetles though, and indeed all the hives we’d go on to look at had a lot of hive beetles with no ill effects.
   These bees run off of any piece of comb as soon as we begin to remove it, so that by the time we’ve removed it from the hive and are holding it up there are few bees on it. Once we’ve finished going through a hive here nearly all the bees are handing in a clump underneath the hive box. The European honeybees I’m accustomed to by and large remain on the comb, ideally ignoring the beekeeper (though if one hasn’t blown enough smoke one sign of imminent trouble is that the bees are all looking at you). Even with a stirred up colony of “Africanized” honeybees (AHB), while a lot will lift off to fly combat air patrols, the overwhelming majority at any given time will remain on the comb. While some of these colonies were a bit more aggressive than an ideal European hive, I found none were as bad as the average AHB colony.
   I had approached the hive fully suited up, but, finding from the behavior of the bees that there weren’t trying to sting me -- “angry” bees make a distinctively different pitch that becomes very recognizable with beekeeping experience, and the usual accompanying behavior of trying to sting one’s gloves and clothes is usually a give-away-- I carefully exposed first a few inches of my wrist between my glove and sleeve (just in case I’d read the scene wrong and there were prehaps angry bees whose sound was masked by the non-angry bees), and then removed one glove and then both and as a demonstration placed my hand squarely amid the bees crawling across the tops of the topbars in the hive. Many of the trainees first made exclamations of amazement at what I had done, as they had never even attempted to take such a risk, but seeing that I didnt’ get stung many then followed my example. This isn’t merely cowboy show-off antics, but rather I think it’s one of the most important lessons that one should be comfortable with the bees and not entirely in fear of them. There’s a trend in beekeeping training to teach new beekeepers to fully suit up every time but there’s compelling reasons to go bare handed if you can -- for example it’s much easier to manipulate the tools and parts of the hive, and being bare-handed will make you hyper-aware if you’re upsetting the bees, but in this case I really wanted to demonstrate to the trainees that their bees weren’t a fearsome danger to be very afraid of coming in contact with. The trainees with bare hands in the hive around me laughed and grinned and called out to their friends who were away looking at other hives to come see what they were doing.
   In topbar hives, under the lid one sees the tops of the “topbars,” lined up the length of the hive. Most of the hives are built pretty well but on some of them the topbars are wider or narrower than the requisite 32mm. This is possibly the most important measurement in beehives. One wants the bees to build exactly one comb hanging along the underside of each topbar and the bees have instinctual ideas about spacing -- too much or too little spacing will force them to either “double-comb” topbars or “cross-comb” across topbars thus leaving the beekeeper unable to remove topbars without breaking combs, smashing bees, and making a mess.
   While most of the hives mostly have suitable topbars there were a fair number of improperly sized ones and the consequent cross-combing problem. Fortunately, I have a measuring tool quickly at hand to measure for correct dimensions -- I had picked up a metal bottle-cap off the ground -- from a fanta bottle but all metal bottle caps seem to be the same size: 32mm. Placing this on topbars immediately tells us if the topbar is the correct width (if you’re doing this to topbars intended for European bees you’ll need a different measuring device, as they will want 38mm wide bars).
   In the third hive we opene up, there is indeed cross-combing. The combs break off as we remove the topbar, and I’m left awkwardly holding a detached piece of comb.
“At home I’d attach this into a frame with a rubber band but uh, I’m not sure what to do here” I admit.
   Hattick translates, and a trainee exclaimes “Ah!” while holding up a finger. He reaches out to a thin vine hanging from a tree that happens to be in arms-reach from where he is already standing. He pulls off a piece of it and further strips it apart like a piece of string cheese, producing a string-like portion that he uses to tie the comb onto the topbar. If held in place it should only take a few days for the bees to reattach the comb. This use of vines is the first of many lessons I would learn myself from the trainees.
Honey is easily harvested from these hives by slicing it off the topbars using a kitchen knife and letting it drop into a bucket. The honey is later squeezed from the comb. Though most of this group know basically how to operate these hives, I’m alarmed to see them about to harvest the uncapped honey every time they encounter a comb full of it. Nectar in flowers is 80-95% water, which is approximately opposite the proportions the bees want.
   “What is the water content of honey?” a trainee asks me as I’m trying to explain this.
   As I’m thinking “I don’t know that obscure statistic” my mouth opens and rather to my surpise the answer of “14-17%” comes out.
Bees “ripen” nectar into honey by dehydrating it in the hive, while enzymes work some other magic as well. The reasons for this dehydration are twofold: (1) with a water content higher than 17% it could ferment and it’s not very useful for the bees to all get drunk; (2) the bees’ interest in honey is as energy storage (consider that they don’t put on fat -- the honey is their analogous energy reserve), and it’s extremely space-inefficient to store it heavily diluted in water. As a beekeeper you don’t want to harvest this “unripened” honey because it will be thin, overly liquidy, and worst of all likely to ferment (which, when unexpected, usually upsets the people you’ve sold it to, and can also cause containers to explode). It is fortunately easy to determine when the honey is “done” because the bees seal over the top of the cell when it is done, and thus “capped honey” is what beekeepers are looking to harvest.
   Some of the less experienced trainees also are inclined to try to harvest “brood comb,” which is the darker brown section of the comb in which bee larvae are developing under capped cells. Bee larvae are obviously composed of mainly proteins, and not honey, and harvesting them with the honey is to be strictly avoided. The addition of significant amounts of protein into honey can make it cloudy, and being as this same person is likely harvesting unripe honey so the water content is high enough to allow bacterial growth, the whole thing could rot with disgusting and/or dangerous results.
   And this is partly why field visits are so critical on projects. I had already covered this stuff during “lecture,” but I can see many of the trainees are itching to harvest what looks to them to be a full comb and only reluctantly under my admonishments do they put it back.
   It is important to understand some socio-economic underpinnings for why they were inclined to do some things. Namely, I gather most of them live a bit far from where they have hives and none of them have a car. They are accustomed to infrequently visiting their hives and harvesting all they can when they’re there. I know there are real challenges to them coming out too frequently and if they leave honey the bees might consume it before they get back (or human thieves take it -- a frequent complaint is that the nomadic Fulani herdsmen who still wander the area rob their hives) but it’s my hope that by the end of the training and under the encouragement of some of the members who seem to have a strong aptitude for beekeeping, they’ll all learn to strategically plan their visits to pair their socioeconomic realities with the best beekeeping practices.
   After the initial few hives, I find my comments are often the same, and, moreover, because they have to be translated to the rest of the beekeepers, the one or two best trainees have more or less taken over the teaching. Realizing this, I begin to feel a bit redundant, like I’m losing control of the session, but then I reason that there was absolutely nothing wrong with this and content myself with only jumping in if there is something new or I sense the teaching might not be perfectly accurate, and far from looking at me like I’m redundant I’m sensing an increasing fond respectfulness from the trainees. They’ve begun to call me “otunba,” a high traditional title.
Suddenly I hear a commotion. I look up to see trainees backing away from a hive and some are running towards it with sticks. It turns out on lifting the lid they discovered a lime green snake under the lid. A rhythmic wacking sound accompanies excited exclamations as they beat it to death.
   “Is it venomous?” I ask
   “They don’t know” says Hattrick, and perhaps seeing the frown I was trying to hide elaborated that “it’s better to be safe.”
I’m rather concerned that this treatment of the snake isn’t quite necessary, but their safety in re potentially venomous snakes is not within my purview.

   It was generally agreed that the field visit was very productive and henceforth every training day consisted of a morning session at the government building and an afternoon trip to a hive site

   Well maybe writing about it will help. Maybe it will jog some memory loose or I'll find at the end of some sentence the hidden answer that has thus far eluded me.

   I can't find my old phone, the one with my US sim card in it. I still need it some itmes becaues there's a few things such as the bank that insist on sending a one time pin code via text to access certain things and insist on only doing so to a US phone number. Super obnoxious. So I have my ancient phnoe just for that. Or I should have my ancient phone for that. My ancient phone should be nowhere other than right here on my desk, and it is not here. There is absolutely no reason it should be anywhere else. I have no reason to move it anywhere else in the house and really no reason to ever take it out of the house. It is not here where it should be. I feel like a computer tha is having a critical error that causes it to restart a process that inevitably leads to the same critical error. I frantically search around and then think, no, there is no reason it should be anywhere other than by my desk. It's charging cable is here by the desk, it only lasts about half an hour away from this cable, that is how useless it is. It is not here.
   I have spent this entire evening looking everywhere in the house for it, even the most implausible places. Even in the garage and the car. I feel like I'm going insane. In a normal evening I spend some time reading, I study spanish, I make dinner, I read some LJs, no I have spent all evening looking for this phone.
   In the past some times after exhausting all possible search options I have thought to myslf "ah well, it will turn up some time." But my $70 external phone battery never did turn back up and I had to buy a new one. My wax molds haven't turned up, and that book I was reading haven't turned up. I am feeling rather that it isn't that things will just turn up again so much as if I don't find it immediately it will definitely make its disappearance permanent. So when I reach the point I can't think of another even implausible but theoretically just maybe possible place to search, and feel like giving up, I think to myself, no, then it will be gone forever! And I return to the area around my desk and the end of the charging cable where it should be, and it is not here, and I want to pull my hair out. I'd almost think someone came in and took it but it is probably the most useless absurd thing to take from this house.
   I don't think I've used it for a month, which leaves a bit of time to try to carefully try to think of any time I might have cleaned or rearranged things in its vicinity which may have caused it to be moved. But I've checked every drawer, shelf, or box where it could possibly possibly have been put and it's not there. I feel like I'm going insane. Why is it not here? ::goes insane::

   Anyway, I think I can just barely scrape together the energy to cut paste the next section of the memoir here to keep that going:

Day 4 - Training
February 16th, 2012 – “Let’s start with the most basics and build from there to the more complex,” I tell the assembled beekeepers. We’re under a corrugated metal awning by the side of the local government headquarters, me sitting behind a table with Dayo beside me, and thirty of them facing me on folded chairs. About three quarters of them are men, they wear mostly patterned traditional clothing, though a few wear articles of western clothing. The men often have smoothly shaved scalps, and some wear brimless hats. The women all wear the Muslim headscarf that leaves their face entirely exposed, and one of them is nursing a baby.
    I’d been told the plan for the project is that I would lecture about bees every day, and going out to the actual bee sites to do hands-on training was “not in the budget.” The daunting task of talking about bees for hours every day for two weeks stretches out before me, seeming impossible. How will I talk about bees for eleven days straight? This is going to end in a shameful disaster for me!
   “So there’s three types of bees in a hive” I explain to the thirty pairs of eyes watching me expectantly. “We’ll talk about them each more in more detail later. The first type is the queen, there will be one queen, she lays the eggs.” Is my audience looking unsettled? “Second there’s workers, they’re female and make up ninety-nine percent of the colony, they do all the work.” My audience is definitely shifting and murmuring restlessly, and I’m only two sentences in! “And finally, there are the drones, they don’t do any work and their purpose is just to mate with queens…” I trail off as it looks like I have a mutiny on my hands. One of the trainees raises his hand and then says something to Dayo in pidgin, and there’s a clamor of agreement.
   “They can’t understand you.” he tells me. Hmm okay. I try speaking very slowly with careful enunciation. The audience is still mutinous. I want to die. I see two weeks of marinating in shame ahead of me.
   “What if you translate for me?” I ask Dayo.
   “Sure”
   I repeat the introduction to the three castes of bees, and Dayo code-switches it into Nigerian pidgin English, which I can mostly understand but almost every word is pronounced slightly differently. As best I can understand what he says it goes like this:
   “There are three types of bees der, the first one are the queen, wipita capitapata for the bee colony. The second type they be the workers -- the workers, them be female and they tend to do all the work for the bee colony andeplasdatoo about ninety-nine percent of them. The third type is the drones, the drones dem the male and they not they do any work. The only work with them they do is just to sleep with the queen andteshakedey fertilized.”
   This seems to work well actually and so we proceed, with me talking in English and Dayo translating my English to their English. The trainees also write questions on notes and pass them up, which I read while Dayo is giving his translation and use them to guide the discussion.
   By and by, I have made it to lunch time! Half a day done, 10.5 to go! Half the group goes to a mosque around the corner to pray, the other half are Christian it seems. A local staple, amala, which is a doughy ball of yam and flour, served in a very spicy soup with a bit of meat, is passed out. Everyone else eats it the traditional way, pulling off a piece of the amala with their fingers, dipping it in the saucey soup, and popping it in their mouth -- and I try this but don’t quite like the pasty way it feels to get my fingers so covered in it, so when someone brings me a spoon I eagerly use it. Amala will be our lunch every day, with variations between beef, chicken, and goat for the meat.
   After lunch, the lecture continues. I can easily talk about the basic behavior of the respective castes of bees, and how it practically relates to beekeeping, and how these behaviors relate to important hive-level activity such as reproduction of new colonies. I think it’s important to know what the bees would naturally do and how a beekeeping activity works with the bees to accomplish something for mutual benefit. There’s a natural flow of topics dovetailing into one another through the lifecycle of bees that touches on all aspects of beekeeping. Though some of the trainees know a fair bit, they seem to appreciate this comprehensive discussion. I can fill at least two days like this! I think to myself with the fragile relief of a fate merely postponed.

   I toss and turn in my bed like bacon sizzling on a grill. Without the exhaustion of a 27 hour journey which had made sleeping easy the night before, tonight the eight hour time difference has my body thinking 10pm is 2pm. The mosquito netting around the bed is gently illuminated with the dim golden glow of the somnolent city -- I leave the blackout blinds open, preferring city light to waking up in tomb-like darkness. Finally I drift to sleep, and let us once again suppose I had strangely accurate meflequinated dreams:
   It’s 1840 and the Fulani Jihad that had pursued the Zazzau to Abuja has spread across Yorubaland as well. The once mighty kingdom of Oyo is collapsing before the onslaught, the Fulani horsemen thundering indomitably across the open savannas. The surviving Yoruba warriors flee southward, where the land gradually becomes more forested and increasingly is almost impassable scrub off the trails and cleared ground. Here on the edge of the forest they gather into a town built on a rocky ridge on top of a hill, called Eba Odan or “by the edge of the forest.”
   The ragged warriors make their way up the trails and through the narrow entrances of the three concentric palisade walls of the town. There are cavalry on tired horses, with their lances and swords, which resemble a heavy cutlass, slightly curved and sharpened only on one side), and infantry with their four-foot hide shields and spears. As well as the traditional armaments, some warriors in the town sit cleaning guns acquired in trade with Europeans in Lagos to the south. Refugees from the north bring with them alarming tales of the tides of war. The emir of the northern Yoruba town of Ilorin has defecting his allegiance to the Sokoto Caliphate, taking with him much of the Oyo cavalry, and the capital of old Oyo Town has been razed by the Fulanis.
   The chief warriors gather in the town square. The long wood-and-thatch houses of the chieftains surround the square, and some palm trees wave at the sky. The foremost warriors are the Eso, a rank bestowed upon only a few dozen cavalrymen who have proven their prowess and ability to abide by the code of honor. These knights of the Yoruba gather in a circle surrounded by the many other warriors as their leader, the Bashorun, outlines his plan to make a stand here against the Fulani.
“The high king, the Alaafin, as you know has charged us with defending what remains of the Oyo Kingdom and defeating the Fulani invaders,” the Bashorun addresses the gathered warriors.
“Eso Elepo, I would like to appoint you as the Ibalogun, commander of our forces” he says turning to one of the foremost warriors. The assembled crowd cheers their approval, but when the noise dies down Elepo is shaking his head.
   “My own name is enough for me, I wish no title beyond eso, like my father before me.”
They try to convince him but to no avail. And so the Bashorun instead bestows the title of Ibalogun on another warrior, eso Oderinlo.


Look mate if ancient Yoruba warriors can wear masks you can too

   The Fulani armies of the Sokoto Caliphate close in on Ibadan, past the outlying villages of Ilobu and Edo, and are funnelled into ever narrower paths by the thickening forest. Suddenly from the thickets around them there is the roar of guns, followed by the screaming onrush of Yoruba warriors through the gunsmoke and shrubs, led by eso Elepo, hurling their spears and swinging their heavy swords. The Fulani horses rear up and the warriors brandish their lances but there’s no room to maneuver.
   The Ibadans pursue the Fulanis to the village of Edo, and in their bloodlust are prepared to raze it before Elepo and his men stop them, reminding them that the Edoans are their people. They advance further to Ilobu and again Elepo holds back the wild warriors from destroying it. In gratitude the people of Ilobu heap gifts in front of Elepos tent.
As the victorious warriors troop back through Ibadan to the central square, the gathered crowds cheer for no one more than edo Elepo. When they are gathered before the Bashorun the Ibalogun complains that Elepo is taking credit beyond his station for their victories, and demands he prostrate himself before him.
   “I prostrate myself before no one but the Bashorun!” Elepo objects. The Ibalogun scowls darkly at him but Elepo is too powerful to punish.
   “What is your plan now?” the Bashorun asks
   “We will advance towards Osogbo across the Osun river” the Ibalogun proposes, “to push the Fulani entirely out of this area of Yorubaland. We can’t compete with their horsemen on the open plains during daylight but we will only seek to meet them by night.”
   “Yes this is a good plan will you take the entire army?” the Bashorun asks.
   “No,” says the Ibalogun with a sneer, “Eso Elepo can remain here with his thousand men.”
   “You can’t win without Elepo!” blurted out one of Elepo’s supporters, eliciting a glare from the Ibalogun.

   A warrior comes galloping up the trail from Osogbo. There are cuts on his muscular arms that look like they’ll scar but he sits straight and proud in his saddle.
“What news??” people call to him as he enters the palisade gates, “were you victorious?” but he stares straight ahead expressionlessly as he rides up the streets to the central square and Bashorun’s house. There he dismounts and enters. A short time later the Bashorun emerges, looks around the crowd that has gathered, expressionlessly, and then breaks into a grin to announce
   “They have won a great victory! The Fulani tide has been turned back!” and the crowd broke into loud cheers.
   A little later, however, when the Bashorun saw eso Elepo he took him aside.
   “The messenger reports that the war chiefs want you to leave, with the glory they have now won you cannot stand against them.”
   “You won’t stand up for me? Remember when I alone stood up for you after the Ota War, when the Bashorun Lakanle and his war chiefs ordered that you would not be permitted to return?”
   “Yes, yes, my friend, I remember. “ Bashorun Oluyole says putting his hand on Elepo’s shoulder, “listen, just temporarily go to Ipara until I can smooth things out here.”
   Elepo looks his friend in the eye and knows he’ll never return but nods resignedly.


Ibadan in the 1850s

   And now, Abuja by daylight!

Day 2 - Abuja
February 14th, 2012 – The next morning, I’m in the hotel lobby reading the newspaper (“Director of Information Ministry Shot at Government House”) when an elderly Caucasian man coming from the stairs greets me in a midwestern accent.
   “Hi! Are you Kris?”
   “Yes, you must be Doug” I say, extending my hand. He is a lean fellow who looks to be in about his mid sixties, with mischievous laughing eyes and white hair sticking out from under his fluorescent yellow baseball cap.
   “Hey we have some time before Blessing is picking us up, want to check out the local market with me?” he proposes. I look anxiously out the gates of the hotel, where an armed guard is in the process of using a mirror to check underneath a car for bombs. Out there? I remember all the stories of violence, the police don’t go out at night because they’re not safe. I look at his ensemble, a subdued hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, and sandals with socks. My self identity definitely does not include being less brave than someone who wears socks with sandals.
   “Okay yeah, let's go” steeling myself, I put down the newspaper.

   The streets are broad, with only light traffic. Locals walk past us in a purposeful manner without a second look. Some wear business suits, some wear patterned traditional outfits with colorful brimless hats. As we walk down a block of three story buildings full of shops and little restaurants, Doug cheerfully tells me about his recent adventures in Ethiopia. He had ridden camels through sand storms in the Afar badlands to visit salt flats, sulphur springs and remote volcanoes. I feel envious and inspired, I want to do things like this, but how does one do that?
   “Is that.. safe?” I ask, addressing my first concern.
   “Oh, yeah,” he cheerfully answers, “a tourist was killed last month and they wanted to make sure it didn't happen again, so the army was out with kalashnikovs.”
   “How do you even arrange that?” I ask.
   “Oh, I don't know, it just kind of fell into place.”
   We arrive at a smallish grocery store, and go inside. I had been expecting something more exotic, big baskets of colorful spices and piles of strange fruits, because, again, that’s all that’s ever shown on TV as an “African market,” and what I had seen in a previous trip to Egypt at the famous Khan El Khalili bazaar; instead I find a fairly typical grocery store of orderly straight aisles stocked with packaged foods. We make our way to the aisle of glass jars of jam, jelly and honey.
   “Ah here's the honey... let's see... product of Texas!” Doug rolls his eyes.

   During the drive to the Organization’s headquarters I see more of the city in the daylight for the first time, the streets are broad with only light traffic, bordered by tree-lined sidewalks, and yet it’s also distinctly different from a typical American city. For one thing, where most commercial buildings in American cities follow a basic and unimaginative boxy design, save for the occasional postmodernist library or corporate headquarters building, nearly every building in Abuja seems to have been custom designed as if a plain box shape is simply unacceptable. Simple rotundas, stepped entrances and distinct building wings break up building shapes in an elegant manner. I finally see some semblance of a hut -- a restaurant with a stylized large conical thatched roof, more a fancy design conceit than building expediency. From many places in the city one can see a huge rock rising 1200 feet out of the center of the city.
   “That’s Aso Rock” Blessing points to it. “You see that building on top, that’s the president’s house.” While Doug and I are oohing-and-awing at it he continues “there’s actually an even bigger rock just outside of town, called Zuma Rock, it’s also on the 100 naira note.”
   We drive through intersections with traffic signals that aren’t on, cars just weaving through the cross traffic as best they can.
   Arriving at the Organization’s compound, Blessing noses up to the solid iron gate and gives the horn a quick toot, a boy of about 15 pops his head up in the window of a little kiosk-sized guardhouse built into the wall beside the gate, and then disappears to appear a moment later pushing open the gate and then closing it behind us. There’s a dirt parking area with a few land-cruisers and a two story building with a few sets of stairs leading to different entrances, evidently other organizations or companies.
   The Organization’s Nigeria field office is just a small cluster of three or four offices and a conference room. Though its international headquarters is in Little Rock, Arkansas, all their field staff are locals of the countries in which they operate. In addition to the driver Blessing; we meet the accountant, a skinny young man; the secretary, a quiet young woman; John, a “Program Associate” who accompanies volunteers out into the field, a charismatic young man around my own age; and Mike the country director. Mike is a kindly middle-aged fellow, who worked for the World Bank before working for the Organization. While we’re talking to him he gets a notification on his phone and suddenly looks very troubled. After a moment he tells us
   “A bomb just went off in Kaduna, which is just north of here. My family is in Kaduna.” After a moment he gets another notification and informs us “my family is okay” but he still seems a bit shaken. We’re told the plan is that John will accompany Doug to his project, but as to me, Mike will accompany me on a short in-country flight to the city of Ibadan and leave me there in the hands of a local partner organization.
   26 Hours later in Ibadan, I would see Mike looking a lot more troubled after getting off his phone -- “There’s been an incident with Doug’s team”

   Once again here is the more or less first draft of my travel memoir, any feedback is much appreciated. This is the second scene of the second chapter (or you could consider it a continuation of the first scene, they're not very seperated).

   In the warm humid darkness just outside the terminal, there’s a rich scent of plant life in the air, as if one’s stuck one’s nose into a hedge. From the moment I grab my bag from the luggage conveyor, porters begin weedling me to employ them to carry it, but aside from it being easy enough for me to carry myself I have no local currency to pay them with, so the importuning makes me feel set upon and increasingly anxious as I desperately look for my contact. As usual just outside the baggage claim there’s a crowd of people with signs or hawking taxi or hotel services. I scan the crowd trying not to encouragingly make eyecontact with any of the service hawkers and add them to my porters. Ah but there’s a man with a sign with my name no it. The man holding it is stocky, with a hairless head, and might have looked tough if he’d stop grinning for a moment. He extends a hand with a gold-looking watch hanging loosely from the wrist.
   “Hi, I’m Blessing, I’m the driver” He says cheerfully in a thick Nigerian accent. I grasp his hand like a lifeline -- henceforth I should be in the Organization’s capable hands. If I had known 48 hours later he’d be under arrest for a potential murder charge I probably would have been a lot more uneasy. The porters melt away as we walk a short distance across the parking lot to the white landcruiser. I try to stare into the empty darkness around the airport, are there giraffes out there? Elephants? Zebras?
   Soon we’re out of the airport and zipping along a broad divided highway. It seems about three lanes wide per side though there are no lane markers, and though it appears to be a freeway, there are occasional speed bumps. The Abuja airport, it turns out, is about half an hour out of town. Peering out into the darkness in hopes of seeing zebras or maybe some quaint huts, I see only the occasional blocky modern building, and a crashed car left on the side of the road … and a mile or two later another one … and another...
   “The tow trucks won’t come out at night” Blessing explains, after noticing my head swiveling to watch each wreck go by, “because it’s not safe at night. So crashed cars remain till morning.” I wondered if the same goes for ambulances.
A pair of headlights approaches on our side of the median. Surely I’m not seeing this right. Blessing steers us to the far left of the laneless roadway as a car zipps past on the right side, clearly going the wrong direction on our side of the median.
   Instead of commenting on this Blessing says.
   “There is another American beekeeping volunteer here”
   “Oh yeah?”
   “Yes, his name is Doug. He just came from Ethiopia, he is a very interesting man”
   “Oh, I hope I will meet him.”
   “He is at the hotel where you are staying, you will surely meet him tomorrow.”
   Another oncoming car hurdles past.
   “Umm,” I say, raising a finger questioningly.
   “They wouldn't do that during the day, they would be arrested,” Blessing chuckles, “but there's no police at night. Probably they want to get somewhere on this side of the highway and rather than drive to the next break in the median they take an earlier one and drive down this side,” he explains in his heavily accented English.
   “Oh.”
   Presently we are driving in the city of Abuja, and from what I can tell it looks indistinguishable from an American town -- parking lots and multi story buildings and illuminated billboards, though none of the traffic signals seem to be operational. All my life African cities have always been portrayed in one of two ways on TV: miserable overcrowded shanty towns in the news and movies, and, in national geographic, full of quaint huts. Had I just traveled halfway around the world for a thoroughly mundane experience?
   Arriving at the hotel, uniformed guards with AK-47 machine guns casually slung over their shoulders use a mirror on a pole to look under the car for bombs and look in our trunk before lifting the boomgate and allowing us to proceed to the hotel entrance.
   “I’ll be back at 9am to take you to the office” he says as I get out and thank him.
   “The police don’t go out at night, you probably shouldn’t either.” he adds as a warning before smiling and bidding me goodnight.
Having only ever stayed in budget hotels before, I marvel at the broad glamorous hotel lobby. The porter takes me up the broad stairs, there’s a uniformed guard on the 2nd floor landing and another at the 3rd. He’s a young man with a friendly face, in a solid avocado green uniform, and he nods to me as I pass.
   The porter shows me to a room that is huge and luxurious compared to the Motel 6es I am accustomed to. A white mosquito net hangs like a veil around the bed. The porter sets the AC to blasting and turns on the TV before leaving me. I hurry to turn down the AC before freezing to death, and then spend a few minutes trying to figure out how to turn off the TV. Exhausted from the 27 hour journey, I climb under the mosquito veil and am soon asleep.

   I have finally, after a two year delay, posted the third episode of my podcast about my projects in Africa! The three thus far are all right on about 20 minutes long and are all about Nigeria, though I think I have now concluded the Nigeria arc.

   After a certain amount of time had passed it became harder to update because I felt I had to relearn how to do it, but I'm hoping that now that I've relearned it again and having more time on my hands now I might be able to keep up the originally intended monthly update schedule now.

   Incidentally when I wrote my script and read it to myself for time it was about nine minutes. And I was like oh no, the target is more like twenty minutes, like the others! But then I realized it was actually already longer than the others (in terms of length of written script), and sure enough, when I read it for recording, which apparently I actually do more at ease and conversationally than reading it to myself, it was right on twenty minutes.

   I also submitted to itunes podcasts so when they gets approved it might be available on itunes *like a real podcast!*

   I'm thinking maybe this weekend I'll see if I can wrap my brain around some very simple audio +slideshow = youtube video, to put the podcast on youtube accompanied by pictures pertinent to whats being discussed.



   Nigeria Episode III

   I am already rather thinking of tackling Ethiopia next, which would make sense because it was the second country in Africa I went to anyway, but also there's heaps to say about it. Though I was thinking a little bit to skip around to the ever popular story of Cristina and I on our mad dash around the Caribbean. I'm currently having fun writing a little series for the local newsletter about my travels and for them I started with the two part Caribbean adventure, then did Nigeria, and I think I'll do Kyrgyzstan next just to keep jumping around.


   And the ever continuing covidia case count, recall in last post on the 10th it was "1,293 active cases in Australia." Well today it is 2,448 currently active cases, mostly in Melbourne.

So of course after putting a heap of effort into making that podcast (Nigeria #1 - Arrivals and First Impressions) I'm not sure anyone listened to it except the two or three close friends I guilted into listening to it to give me feedback. So much for going immediately viral hey. BUT hey podcastery is a nearly completely foreign media to me (I only listen to This American Life and that by irregularly going directly to their website at random intervals when I'm doing menial work at work and realize there's probably an update in the weeks since I last checked) so I have yet to figure out how to be properly.. poddy trained? ahaha.

I asked my one friend who does regularly like every day listen to podcasts where she gets them and she said castbox.fm, which immediately became in my head and will henceforth be referred to as catbox (to be used once your cat has been poddy trained??). So I uploaded my podcast there. I have thus far not even been able to get that friend (Billie) to listen to it ::sigh::

I've learned to go back and delete my "umm"s and awkward pauses, and even go back and insert something recorded at a different time into the middle of an audio file, so that was an achievement. On the minus side, both the sites I've uploaded to don't seem to allow me to replace the audio file that's been already uploaded, so I can't do what I do with livejournal which is usually continue to come back to entries and tweak parts that are bothering me. If you actually listen to my episode that is up, I say it's "Episode II" but clearly it is Episode I. I was thinking of the intro as Episode I when I said that but it's not worth fixing. Also I'm not super happy with the part where I repeat myself about Nigerians being proud of being business owners but also it's proved too tedious to replace that bit.

Part of why I'm into this project is learning to dabble in another form of media as well as gain a better understanding of the podcastsphere, so at least I'm achieving those goals if not actually getting listened to myself.

I searched both podcast sites (Catbox and SoundCloud) for other travelogues to you know evaluate the competition / see how they are faring ... and so far have found hardly any at all and those I have found seem dreadfully dull. Hey my first episode has multiple bombs going off, car crashes, a plane crash, inexplicable pirate ships, and a cliffhanger. Hmm actually maybe I should replace my current bland summary of "first impressions of Africa" with that sentence I just wrote. See this is why I like blogging, it helps me sort things out since apparently I have no internal monologue other than this.

Anyway I was going to post the script of the entry here since you are, after all, a bunch of livejournalists who might not be expected to change your habits to listen to a podcast anyway. And I had the script all written and ready to go .... except my computer decided to reset itself to install updates and dumped everything I hadn't saved, which was a lot of things since I pretty much never intentionally shut down my computer unless its for travel and all too often neglect to save things. I do have the first draft of the script and I'll try to make some quick changes of the major things I changed but if you want the "final" version you're a gonna have to listen to the podcast. ;) I know I know its a bother to sit and listen to something for twenty minutes while you're sitting at a computer but the key is to cue it up and listen to it while you're out chopping wood in your flannel and beard or in the kitchen chopping carrots (best trade out the axe), or driving to work with your flannel tie on (with cute little axe shaped tie clip??).

( Episode I - Arriving in Nigeria - Transcript )