I’m writing this blog entry during the day largely because I don’t have enough to do while the neighborhood-mapping project is going on (since one of the RAs politely asked me not to come along since I always “create so much suspicion”!)…
So, here are a few things I’ve been thinking about today. First, I really appreciate very simple things when living here on a tight budget. Like a pile of newly-washed t-shirts sitting on my shelf in my room. To get them this clean, I had to walk to the central water tank at the guest house compound, fill my bucket, lug it back to my cabin, fling the t-shirts and washing powder together and sort of try to simulate washing-machine motions. Then dump it all out over my shower drain. Then trek back to water tank for fresh water in my bucket. Lug it back to my room, and then rinse the shirts. Then wring them out over the shower drain. Then haul the wet shirts outside to hang on the clothes-line down the hill, all the while trying to kill the mosquitoes before they get me… Basically, I *love* my t-shirt today. It’s the nicest, cleanest t-shirt I have *ever* worn. I honestly don’t think it has ever been quite such a nice shade of pink.
Or the fact that I have clean drinking water in my cabin, since I had to beg for a mug from the kitchen (it’s usually against the rules to take dishes from the kitchen and keep them in your cabins, for I guess a logical enough- reason). The drinking water is stored in a separate tank behind the kitchen, so I have to lug my water-jug home with me every night after dinner. So, when I take a drink, the taste is *amazing* (for anyone who knows her, I’m saying this in a Shlomit-talking-about-food voice J).
Or salad! It’s not like it’s reached the status of chocolate or anything, but it has taken on a new importance in my life, as greens equal proper digestion!! I feel like celebrating when I come into the dinner room at the guest house and see green stuff on the table instead of an entirely yellow-and-brown spread.
I also appreciate electricity in a way I obviously don’t at home. Yesterday we had light in the office for five straight hours. It was like a holiday – I typed like crazy and got so much work done. Today, unfortunately, it’s 1 pm and light *just* came on for the first time today, so I’ve been doing things like counting the number of blocks on each enumeration area map to determine how many households we should sample from each area, which doesn’t require a computer. After that was finished, I started writing down all of the riot-related stories I’ve heard in informal settings here in Jos. That took about 30 minutes. Then I started daydreaming about all of the things I want to do in New York during the 48 hours I have there before we head to Austin for Christmas. This was *not* useful but I guess it was fun.
Finally, I got fed up and locked up the office, grabbed an okada (with some trepidation, after their crazy strike on Tuesday) and went into the center of town to check email and pick up Western Union money at the bank, and at least make myself *feel* a bit more productive.
Town center is really funny here, since it’s the only place where you see all of these white people around. They all seem to congregate at this internet café called AfriOne. Admittedly, the place is very nice – they have chocolate cakes and sorbet, serve all kinds of salads and play BBC world service on TV all day. Oh, and an order of fries is one dollar and is larger than anywhere else in the country, I’m convinced. So, I don’t entirely blame the oyibo crowd for hanging at AfriOne. In fact, during my first trip to Africa, I hung out constantly at a place in Kampala not entirely unlike this one. But at the same time I can't deny that I view the place with a bit of contempt. This is because I know most of the customers are businessmen or NGO people who live in big houses with maids and eat too much and don’t ride okadas because they have drivers.
It’s ridiculous to look down on these people, of course. They live here permanently with their families, and sometimes with small children, and I’m just a short-timer. Besides, if I had any money, I might hire a driver, too, because okadas are the most dangerous way to get around, short of walking in the middle of the road. It’s kind of hard to explain, but I guess I feel a little smug because all of my friends here are Nigerian and because I’m trying to learn Hausa and because I eat in “local joints” once in a while.
God, I sound like Paul Theroux in “Dark Star Safari” and I *hate* that book! And I hate it precisely because he thinks he’s so great because he “roughs it” in Africa. I wanted to strangle him half the time I was in Uganda reading the book. I got so irritated when he described how he slept outside in the desert in Sudan when there was a hotel nearby, entirely to have bragging rights in his book. I’m SURE it was incredibly uncomfortable to sleep in a pile of sand, with the wind beating down on you in the middle of a war-torn country. Hmm… I guess I’m a bit conflicted here. Can I look down on the oyibos who hang out at AfriOne but also be annoyed by Paul Theroux, who tries his best to reject the expat life-style? I guess I’ll leave this train of thought for a while and mull it over....
There’s really not too much else to report at the moment. I have yet to find a reliable business-center where I can print and photocopy my surveys, but we don’t start recruiting respondents until Monday, so I can’t feel too much urgency yet. I’ve edited the questionnaire and the sampling instructions to make them Jos-appropriate. I guess the main thing left to is to randomly select which non-conflict areas to include in our study. Because there were only six really intense conflict neighborhoods during the 2001 Jos riots (a very interesting contrast with Kaduna which I’m not quite sure how to explain beyond a blunt hypothesis about the neighborhood-level religious balance), I decided to recruit from all six. Now I need to pick 4 non-conflict neighborhoods from a list of about 30. We’ll be mapping conflict areas through Saturday, so I guess I should sort this out tonight.
Any email updates from New York or anywhere else would be great… Thanks!
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Crazy Jos, November 27
After a smooth ride down here on Sunday, and a relatively smooth day of office-shopping on Monday, Tuesday came as quite a shock to our team, when a violent demonstration led by okada drivers (commercial motorbike drivers) paralyzed the town. Road-blocks were erected all over the town center and the immediate outskirts (including the neighborhood where my guest-house is located), leaving several of my RAs stranded on their way to meet me at work. One of my RAs was chased by an okada driver while on her way to work, and another very nearly missed being gassed by anti-riot policemen. The rest of us found ourselves stranded within the walls of my guesthouse compound all day. It was a harrowing experience.
The most interesting part of the whole event, though, took place during the first few hours of the day, when nobody in our area really knew what was going on, and rumors started to circulate that the “crisis in town” was a religious riot. We were terrified by these rumors, given that we were all sitting in the main lobby of a Lutheran guest-house located right in the middle of a Muslim neighborhood. High walls or not, it was a scary experience. I was especially fascinated to see how the “crisis” immediately got coded as religious violence, even before there was any real information available to people on the outskirts of town.
Several of my Muslim and several of my Christian RAs began to argue at one point about the cause of the “religious crisis,” after one of the Muslims mentioned that his Imam had advised them in mosque the night before to go out and protest against the building of a brand-new CAN (Christian Association of Nigeria) secretariat in a Muslim neighborhood, and against the tearing down of a local government secretariat building to make way for the CAN structure. Hearing this, one of my Christian RAs chimed in by saying that “these young Hausa boys should just stop making trouble, why can’t they just leave here and go back to the far North?”… I tried my best to defuse the tension and we ultimately decided to just wait for news before jumping to any conclusions.
Several of the guest house staff had been in town earlier in the morning and had seen young guys, some of them armed, rampaging on the streets. Again, without really looking into the matter (for obvious reasons, they raced to get home inside the compound walls), they coded the crisis as religious.
We spent the entire day locked up in the guesthouse, not sure what was going on, and unsure of the safety of some of the RAs who’d gotten stranded in different parts of town. I spent a good deal of time imagining what I would do if our compound came under attack. It was not until about 2 in the afternoon, when the woman who owns our office building drove into our compound to updated us and tell us that things were quieting down that we realized it was an okada drivers riot – and that they were protesting the imposition of an 8 pm curfew for all okadas (i.e., they’re not allowed to operate after 8). We were immensely relieved, not only for the safety of people in Jos, but also for our project – since you can imagine that it would be tough to get permission to do a survey on religious conflict right smack in the middle of such a tense situation.
In any case, the tension died down and by 4 pm we were able to make our way to our office without any problem. And everything has been just fine since. All in all, a pretty scary situation, but one that made me think quite a bit about the priors of ordinary people in a post-conflict environment.
The most interesting part of the whole event, though, took place during the first few hours of the day, when nobody in our area really knew what was going on, and rumors started to circulate that the “crisis in town” was a religious riot. We were terrified by these rumors, given that we were all sitting in the main lobby of a Lutheran guest-house located right in the middle of a Muslim neighborhood. High walls or not, it was a scary experience. I was especially fascinated to see how the “crisis” immediately got coded as religious violence, even before there was any real information available to people on the outskirts of town.
Several of my Muslim and several of my Christian RAs began to argue at one point about the cause of the “religious crisis,” after one of the Muslims mentioned that his Imam had advised them in mosque the night before to go out and protest against the building of a brand-new CAN (Christian Association of Nigeria) secretariat in a Muslim neighborhood, and against the tearing down of a local government secretariat building to make way for the CAN structure. Hearing this, one of my Christian RAs chimed in by saying that “these young Hausa boys should just stop making trouble, why can’t they just leave here and go back to the far North?”… I tried my best to defuse the tension and we ultimately decided to just wait for news before jumping to any conclusions.
Several of the guest house staff had been in town earlier in the morning and had seen young guys, some of them armed, rampaging on the streets. Again, without really looking into the matter (for obvious reasons, they raced to get home inside the compound walls), they coded the crisis as religious.
We spent the entire day locked up in the guesthouse, not sure what was going on, and unsure of the safety of some of the RAs who’d gotten stranded in different parts of town. I spent a good deal of time imagining what I would do if our compound came under attack. It was not until about 2 in the afternoon, when the woman who owns our office building drove into our compound to updated us and tell us that things were quieting down that we realized it was an okada drivers riot – and that they were protesting the imposition of an 8 pm curfew for all okadas (i.e., they’re not allowed to operate after 8). We were immensely relieved, not only for the safety of people in Jos, but also for our project – since you can imagine that it would be tough to get permission to do a survey on religious conflict right smack in the middle of such a tense situation.
In any case, the tension died down and by 4 pm we were able to make our way to our office without any problem. And everything has been just fine since. All in all, a pretty scary situation, but one that made me think quite a bit about the priors of ordinary people in a post-conflict environment.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Long-lost blog, Nov 22
Hi everyone,
Apologies once again for the delay in the blog... All is well in Kaduna. I'm enjoying my Thanksgiving dinner of french fries and a cup of tea at the hotel where I check my email.... Not exactly turkey and stuffing, but not too bad, either. As I don't know a single American in Kaduna (and, in fact, am not sure that there even is one), I decided not to try to pull together a Thanksgiving meal today. Earlier today I found myself with a sick stomach due to what I can only assume was some bad fish, so I'm not even especially hungry.
Otherwise, the survey is winding down now - we've gotten 282 respondents, believe it or not! Some of my RAs have bets out on whether we'll clock 300. This would be nice, of course, but five of us are packing up and heading to Jos on Sunday morning, so we'll see. Since things went so smoothly with the survey, we've started doing a set of interviews with local chiefs, too, to try to build a dataset of neighborhood characteristics across Kaduna city. So far, the RAs have been enjoying meeting rather important people and interviewing them, though, to be honest, their reports suggest that some of them are very pompous but don't have much political influence anyway. Still, the chiefs survey is the best way I can think of to learn about the neighborhoods our respondents are drawn from (due to the complete lack of reliable census data).
The weather has been surprisingly nice in Kaduna lately - pretty sunny and not even too dusty. I think I will be lucky enough to miss the full-on Harmattan, since Jos is supposed to be less affected by it. Fingers crossed that this is actually true. The RAs who are traveling with me to Jos are getting excited but several of them are worried about the "cold" (I think jos will be about 80 degrees instead of Kaduna's 90, in general), and two of them even went to the clothes market and bought fleeces! I find this funny, of course, but I have to make sure not to send them out all day sampling in weather that actually is really cold to them without proper clothing and a lunch break inside.
Otherwise, we had a really fun end-of-survey party last weekend at Ali Baba's - the divey but fabulous Lebanese joint where I spend lots of my after-work time. Mr. Ali himself joined in our party - we played this wonderful game called Mafia (I highly recommend it) for a few hours and nearly brought the roof down. For anyone who knows Mafia - imagine it with a bunch of Nigerians - each accusation prompted a massive argument and show-down of insults. :) Honestly, it was hilarious. I can't remember if I already mentioned this - but my RAs got me a beautiful traditional outfit - Nigerian fabric, sewed by a Senegalese tailor. It's a shirt and trousers set in a range of lovey shades of blue. They even got Bernd a matching shirt! It was very touching and I've been wearing it lots already.
In other competely unrelated news, I have decided that I am the world's worst cook. Any experiment that I try fail massively. I guess some people have it and some don't, and I'm definitely in the latter camp. I've basically been eating "Indomie" (a slightly classier version of Cup Noodle) every night, with a chaser of Doxycycline. Occassionally I spice things up and fry some tomatoes and garlic and dump them into my Indomie. I tried a few other dishes - even basic spaghetti with tomato-sauce and few varieties of cabbage stir-fry, but they didn't really come together. I guess on a similar note, I also thought it would be a good idea to cut my hair the other day, since it's gotten ridiculously long. This also wasn't the greatest success... it's shorter now, but doesn't look any neater. So, aside from the research front, my life here isn't entirely working out. :)
The only other thing to report, on a much more serious note, is that local government elections are going on here and they've actually been pretty ugly so far. Their schedule varies by state and, given the amount of violence that rocked the Kano state elections last week, I'm feeling *VERY* lucky that neither Kaduna nor Plateau state holds their elections until January. My good (and only, I guess) friend from Abuja works for NDI and has been doing election monitoring, and she sent horror stories of waiting in traffic jams to get to polling stations that never even opened, and running into truck-loads of "area boys" (mostly incumbent-party thugs) brandishing machetes to try to intimidate voters and opposition candidates. Thankfully, everything in Kaduna has been very peaceful and quiet. It's incredibly sad in general, though, that democracy is just not functioning here, no matter how you define it. And there is a class of extremely well-educated, bright and motivated young people who are fed up but don't know how to change the situation. Going out on the street to protest seems like a bad idea since the police shoot protesters like it's nobody's business. But there are only so many "commissions of enquiry" into electoral fraud that ordinary voters can bear, since people who steal elections are rarely brought to justice. It's a depressing situation without a clear solution.
Anyway, on a more cheerful note, I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving. Please do keep those emails coming, I'm starting to get a bit more tired and lonely as the weeks creep on.
All best,
Alex
Apologies once again for the delay in the blog... All is well in Kaduna. I'm enjoying my Thanksgiving dinner of french fries and a cup of tea at the hotel where I check my email.... Not exactly turkey and stuffing, but not too bad, either. As I don't know a single American in Kaduna (and, in fact, am not sure that there even is one), I decided not to try to pull together a Thanksgiving meal today. Earlier today I found myself with a sick stomach due to what I can only assume was some bad fish, so I'm not even especially hungry.
Otherwise, the survey is winding down now - we've gotten 282 respondents, believe it or not! Some of my RAs have bets out on whether we'll clock 300. This would be nice, of course, but five of us are packing up and heading to Jos on Sunday morning, so we'll see. Since things went so smoothly with the survey, we've started doing a set of interviews with local chiefs, too, to try to build a dataset of neighborhood characteristics across Kaduna city. So far, the RAs have been enjoying meeting rather important people and interviewing them, though, to be honest, their reports suggest that some of them are very pompous but don't have much political influence anyway. Still, the chiefs survey is the best way I can think of to learn about the neighborhoods our respondents are drawn from (due to the complete lack of reliable census data).
The weather has been surprisingly nice in Kaduna lately - pretty sunny and not even too dusty. I think I will be lucky enough to miss the full-on Harmattan, since Jos is supposed to be less affected by it. Fingers crossed that this is actually true. The RAs who are traveling with me to Jos are getting excited but several of them are worried about the "cold" (I think jos will be about 80 degrees instead of Kaduna's 90, in general), and two of them even went to the clothes market and bought fleeces! I find this funny, of course, but I have to make sure not to send them out all day sampling in weather that actually is really cold to them without proper clothing and a lunch break inside.
Otherwise, we had a really fun end-of-survey party last weekend at Ali Baba's - the divey but fabulous Lebanese joint where I spend lots of my after-work time. Mr. Ali himself joined in our party - we played this wonderful game called Mafia (I highly recommend it) for a few hours and nearly brought the roof down. For anyone who knows Mafia - imagine it with a bunch of Nigerians - each accusation prompted a massive argument and show-down of insults. :) Honestly, it was hilarious. I can't remember if I already mentioned this - but my RAs got me a beautiful traditional outfit - Nigerian fabric, sewed by a Senegalese tailor. It's a shirt and trousers set in a range of lovey shades of blue. They even got Bernd a matching shirt! It was very touching and I've been wearing it lots already.
In other competely unrelated news, I have decided that I am the world's worst cook. Any experiment that I try fail massively. I guess some people have it and some don't, and I'm definitely in the latter camp. I've basically been eating "Indomie" (a slightly classier version of Cup Noodle) every night, with a chaser of Doxycycline. Occassionally I spice things up and fry some tomatoes and garlic and dump them into my Indomie. I tried a few other dishes - even basic spaghetti with tomato-sauce and few varieties of cabbage stir-fry, but they didn't really come together. I guess on a similar note, I also thought it would be a good idea to cut my hair the other day, since it's gotten ridiculously long. This also wasn't the greatest success... it's shorter now, but doesn't look any neater. So, aside from the research front, my life here isn't entirely working out. :)
The only other thing to report, on a much more serious note, is that local government elections are going on here and they've actually been pretty ugly so far. Their schedule varies by state and, given the amount of violence that rocked the Kano state elections last week, I'm feeling *VERY* lucky that neither Kaduna nor Plateau state holds their elections until January. My good (and only, I guess) friend from Abuja works for NDI and has been doing election monitoring, and she sent horror stories of waiting in traffic jams to get to polling stations that never even opened, and running into truck-loads of "area boys" (mostly incumbent-party thugs) brandishing machetes to try to intimidate voters and opposition candidates. Thankfully, everything in Kaduna has been very peaceful and quiet. It's incredibly sad in general, though, that democracy is just not functioning here, no matter how you define it. And there is a class of extremely well-educated, bright and motivated young people who are fed up but don't know how to change the situation. Going out on the street to protest seems like a bad idea since the police shoot protesters like it's nobody's business. But there are only so many "commissions of enquiry" into electoral fraud that ordinary voters can bear, since people who steal elections are rarely brought to justice. It's a depressing situation without a clear solution.
Anyway, on a more cheerful note, I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving. Please do keep those emails coming, I'm starting to get a bit more tired and lonely as the weeks creep on.
All best,
Alex
Saturday, November 10, 2007
November 10
First of all, apologies for the terrible lag in updating the blog. All is well in Kaduna, and the research is really speeding up now. My survey is actually progressing more quickly than I'd expected. We've been accepting respondents at our office since Monday Nov. 5, and we've already gotten 91! So, we're well on our way to meeting our target of 200 for Kaduna before Nov. 24.
Bernd's visit came and went (he left on Thursday morning), and it was *so* nice to have him here! In addition to providing his usual insightful research advice and jumping right in to help me with project logistics, he brought the world's largest box of chocolates (courtesy of Margot Beber). It was such a morale boost! Though my RAs have basically eaten through most of them by now.... I introduced them to these amazing chocolate-covered gingerbread heart-cookies and they blew through them like there was no tomorrow. I'm saving a stash of marzipan for myself, though, which is off-limits to everyone else.
The weather has changed pretty dramatically in the past few days, as the Harmattan season has started. The temperature has dropped quite a bit and the sky is extremely hazy now, as dusty winds from the Sahara have started to blow in. Apparently, the Harmattan lasts for the next two months or so, so this is only the beginning. It's already a bit strange walking around in the haze, and the sky looks eerily grey. I was thinking about wearing sunglasses because of the dust, but my RAs unanimously agreed that this would look ridiculous. So, we'll see how it goes. :)
I really don't have much planned except for work until I leave for Jos on Nov. 24. I'm looking forward to the trip. It's a gorgeous drive (in spite of the potholes on the road and the occassional car break-down, which happened to me last time I made the journey). Jos is set against a lovely set of green hills and the weather is generally cooler than here. (British colonial administrators were actually required to take a few days vacation here a year to "recuperate" from the harsh northern Nigerian climate, and the city was a big hit with missionaries starting the turn of the 20th century.) The Jos region is also the breadbasket of Nigeria. They grow many more types of vegetables there (you see bright green spinach at the market, which is fantastic), so my yellow-cabbage-and-tomato diet is about to get a kick.
The only other news is that the girls working with me on my project have convinced me to get a traditional Nigerian dress made for myself. They're going to take me to the market on Wednesday after work to help me pick out the material. "Nothing too yellow or with too much of a pattern, though, since it will look on you," I was warned this morning. One of my RAs actually works in fashion normally (she has a degree in textile design and is trying to raise the start-up capital to open her own shop), and she suggested I go for something in a dark-blue color. It should be fun seeing how the tailoring works. Apparently, most of the dress-makers in Kaduna are Senegalese immigrants (ethnicized economies again...), and if the dresses that my RAs wear are any indication, their work is incredible.
OK, thanks to everyone for all of your emails. They've been a pleasure to read. I promise a more energetic update in a few days.
Bernd's visit came and went (he left on Thursday morning), and it was *so* nice to have him here! In addition to providing his usual insightful research advice and jumping right in to help me with project logistics, he brought the world's largest box of chocolates (courtesy of Margot Beber). It was such a morale boost! Though my RAs have basically eaten through most of them by now.... I introduced them to these amazing chocolate-covered gingerbread heart-cookies and they blew through them like there was no tomorrow. I'm saving a stash of marzipan for myself, though, which is off-limits to everyone else.
The weather has changed pretty dramatically in the past few days, as the Harmattan season has started. The temperature has dropped quite a bit and the sky is extremely hazy now, as dusty winds from the Sahara have started to blow in. Apparently, the Harmattan lasts for the next two months or so, so this is only the beginning. It's already a bit strange walking around in the haze, and the sky looks eerily grey. I was thinking about wearing sunglasses because of the dust, but my RAs unanimously agreed that this would look ridiculous. So, we'll see how it goes. :)
I really don't have much planned except for work until I leave for Jos on Nov. 24. I'm looking forward to the trip. It's a gorgeous drive (in spite of the potholes on the road and the occassional car break-down, which happened to me last time I made the journey). Jos is set against a lovely set of green hills and the weather is generally cooler than here. (British colonial administrators were actually required to take a few days vacation here a year to "recuperate" from the harsh northern Nigerian climate, and the city was a big hit with missionaries starting the turn of the 20th century.) The Jos region is also the breadbasket of Nigeria. They grow many more types of vegetables there (you see bright green spinach at the market, which is fantastic), so my yellow-cabbage-and-tomato diet is about to get a kick.
The only other news is that the girls working with me on my project have convinced me to get a traditional Nigerian dress made for myself. They're going to take me to the market on Wednesday after work to help me pick out the material. "Nothing too yellow or with too much of a pattern, though, since it will look on you," I was warned this morning. One of my RAs actually works in fashion normally (she has a degree in textile design and is trying to raise the start-up capital to open her own shop), and she suggested I go for something in a dark-blue color. It should be fun seeing how the tailoring works. Apparently, most of the dress-makers in Kaduna are Senegalese immigrants (ethnicized economies again...), and if the dresses that my RAs wear are any indication, their work is incredible.
OK, thanks to everyone for all of your emails. They've been a pleasure to read. I promise a more energetic update in a few days.
Friday, October 26, 2007
October 25
Apologies for the long delay in writing - things are really starting to get busy here, which I can only take as a good thing. Research has started to take off quite a bit and our start-date for the survey is set for Monday Oct. 29. Keep your fingers crossed that people actually come in to be interviewed!!
We've done lots of work since I last posted. I've hired 8 fabulous RAs - 5 Christians and 3 Muslims (I found it harder to recruit Muslims), who are incredibly committed to the project. We've already visited 4 areas in our sample of 8 and made detailed, hand-drawn enumeration area maps, and I've gotten permission from the district heads and "hakimis" (traditional chiefs) in the 8 areas we want to work in. I've been working a lot on the questionnaire and have to just stop revising it at some point. My RAs also translated it into Hausa, so those who feel more comfortable with Hausa than with English can use the translation. For those readers who are more survey-research inclined, I made a few research decisions after encountering lots of resistance from the National Population Commission (NPC), who ultimately decided that their neighborhood maps and population figures for localities in Kaduna are "confidential." So, after a day of feeling miserable, I decided to forget about them, and we've made our own maps and have our own proxy for population density.
I have a huge map of the Kaduna metropolitan area - we photocopied and enlaged the districts we're going to sample from. Then we cut each district into between 6 and 12 pieces of roughly equal size, depending on the total area of the district. Each of these small pieces is an Enumeration Area (EA). We're using street density to proxy for population density. So, along with the RAs, I counted the number of streets in each EA, to make a population density "score." Using that score, I determined how many households should be randomly sampled from each EA. In teams of 2, the RAs have been visiting each EA to correct for mistakes on the map, and to fill in landmarks to use for the random houshold sampling. So, we can say that we've done our best to condition sampling on population density, even without any data from the good old Nigerian government.
Otherwise, the RA group is really interesting in its own right. All of them have finished secondary school, and a few of them have associates degrees from the Kaduna polytechnic. Two finshed university. They're extremely smart and dedicated - two of them actually own cars and they both volunteered their cars for the project! So, now I'm just paying them for the petrol costs, and we have wheels! This makes a huge difference, since some of the districts are very big (one of them is probably as big as Morningside Heights). They've all started joking around with each other quite a lot, and they are extremely tolerant of the group's religious diversity. One day, while in the middle of an intense discussion about a section of my questionnaire, one of the Christian RAs whispered to me that "Mallam Adamu (one of the Muslim RAs) needs to go to the mosque and pray but he hasn't asked you yet." I found this quite touching. They're willing to work extremely long hours and I've been blown away by the quality of their work. The maps they've drawn are beautiful, and they've given me so much useful advice along the way on every step of the project so far. When I visit a Muslim Hakimi, the Muslim male RAs always come along with me and speak to the chief on my behalf, to try to be respectful and make the chief feel comfortable. It has really worked well so far.
Otherwise, I've just really enjoyed the comraderie of having a group of interesting people to talk to. The running joke among the group (to my initial horror) seems to be making fun of each other for being either too fat or too slim. Apparently, they all find this hysterical. Some of the ladies are a little bit overweight but they seem to find it incredibly amusing when the guys tell them that they're not walking fast enough in the field because they're too fat! I initially tried to discourage this line of joking but, honestly, nobody seems to mind.
They also found one of the quesitons on my survey, that uses a story about accepting a chicken versus taking a gamble, (supposed to measure risk aversion) really funny. Anytime anybody does something even slightly daring (for instance, Ibrahim rode in one of our cars without wearing a seatbelt), everybody harrasses them by saying something like, "Eh, Ibrahim wouldn't take the chicken-oh!" Or, for example, if it takes me longer than the rest of the group to cross a major street because I'm scared of oncoming traffic, somebody will inevitably yell, "Eh- Alex would definitely take the chicken-oh! She doesn't like risk." It's kind of entertaining.
Aside from working on the project (which consumes most of my waking hours), there's not much else going on. I have basically zero social life, but that's OK. In other news, a huge lizard was hanging out in our kitchen sink the other day, which scared the living daylights out of me, since I didn't see it while I was chopping onions on the counter. When I walked over to fill our bucket with clean water to wash some tomatoes, I saw the lizard (it was huge) and screamed like a maniac. I then decided to go get schwarma take-out for dinner instead of cooking, and Kwase asked her steward to remove the lizard. Similarly, a huge grasshopper was sitting on the hot water kettle in the bathroom. I had really wanted to take a bath but couldn't bring myself to hit the "on" button on the kettle, as the grasshopper was right next to it (and we're talking a *huge* grasshopper here). So, I boiled water downstairs in the kitchen instead. I'm trying to get used to the lovely wildlife around our house, but it's taking some time. Kwase made a pretty good point when she asked why I was brave enough to study in Nigeria but couldn't shoo away a grasshopper.....
Bernd arrives on Wednesday, and I'm really excited to see him. We've already been apart for longer than any other time since we've been married. He's under strict instructions to bring lots of chocolate with him, as I'm in acute chocolate-withdrawal at the moment. I've even heard some rumors about a package of marzipan being sent from Germany to NY with the express purpose of bringing it to Nigeria. But I'm trying not to be too nosy about that.... We'll see if that transpires. OK, thanks to everyone who has been sending me comments. They're really fun to read - keep them coming!
We've done lots of work since I last posted. I've hired 8 fabulous RAs - 5 Christians and 3 Muslims (I found it harder to recruit Muslims), who are incredibly committed to the project. We've already visited 4 areas in our sample of 8 and made detailed, hand-drawn enumeration area maps, and I've gotten permission from the district heads and "hakimis" (traditional chiefs) in the 8 areas we want to work in. I've been working a lot on the questionnaire and have to just stop revising it at some point. My RAs also translated it into Hausa, so those who feel more comfortable with Hausa than with English can use the translation. For those readers who are more survey-research inclined, I made a few research decisions after encountering lots of resistance from the National Population Commission (NPC), who ultimately decided that their neighborhood maps and population figures for localities in Kaduna are "confidential." So, after a day of feeling miserable, I decided to forget about them, and we've made our own maps and have our own proxy for population density.
I have a huge map of the Kaduna metropolitan area - we photocopied and enlaged the districts we're going to sample from. Then we cut each district into between 6 and 12 pieces of roughly equal size, depending on the total area of the district. Each of these small pieces is an Enumeration Area (EA). We're using street density to proxy for population density. So, along with the RAs, I counted the number of streets in each EA, to make a population density "score." Using that score, I determined how many households should be randomly sampled from each EA. In teams of 2, the RAs have been visiting each EA to correct for mistakes on the map, and to fill in landmarks to use for the random houshold sampling. So, we can say that we've done our best to condition sampling on population density, even without any data from the good old Nigerian government.
Otherwise, the RA group is really interesting in its own right. All of them have finished secondary school, and a few of them have associates degrees from the Kaduna polytechnic. Two finshed university. They're extremely smart and dedicated - two of them actually own cars and they both volunteered their cars for the project! So, now I'm just paying them for the petrol costs, and we have wheels! This makes a huge difference, since some of the districts are very big (one of them is probably as big as Morningside Heights). They've all started joking around with each other quite a lot, and they are extremely tolerant of the group's religious diversity. One day, while in the middle of an intense discussion about a section of my questionnaire, one of the Christian RAs whispered to me that "Mallam Adamu (one of the Muslim RAs) needs to go to the mosque and pray but he hasn't asked you yet." I found this quite touching. They're willing to work extremely long hours and I've been blown away by the quality of their work. The maps they've drawn are beautiful, and they've given me so much useful advice along the way on every step of the project so far. When I visit a Muslim Hakimi, the Muslim male RAs always come along with me and speak to the chief on my behalf, to try to be respectful and make the chief feel comfortable. It has really worked well so far.
Otherwise, I've just really enjoyed the comraderie of having a group of interesting people to talk to. The running joke among the group (to my initial horror) seems to be making fun of each other for being either too fat or too slim. Apparently, they all find this hysterical. Some of the ladies are a little bit overweight but they seem to find it incredibly amusing when the guys tell them that they're not walking fast enough in the field because they're too fat! I initially tried to discourage this line of joking but, honestly, nobody seems to mind.
They also found one of the quesitons on my survey, that uses a story about accepting a chicken versus taking a gamble, (supposed to measure risk aversion) really funny. Anytime anybody does something even slightly daring (for instance, Ibrahim rode in one of our cars without wearing a seatbelt), everybody harrasses them by saying something like, "Eh, Ibrahim wouldn't take the chicken-oh!" Or, for example, if it takes me longer than the rest of the group to cross a major street because I'm scared of oncoming traffic, somebody will inevitably yell, "Eh- Alex would definitely take the chicken-oh! She doesn't like risk." It's kind of entertaining.
Aside from working on the project (which consumes most of my waking hours), there's not much else going on. I have basically zero social life, but that's OK. In other news, a huge lizard was hanging out in our kitchen sink the other day, which scared the living daylights out of me, since I didn't see it while I was chopping onions on the counter. When I walked over to fill our bucket with clean water to wash some tomatoes, I saw the lizard (it was huge) and screamed like a maniac. I then decided to go get schwarma take-out for dinner instead of cooking, and Kwase asked her steward to remove the lizard. Similarly, a huge grasshopper was sitting on the hot water kettle in the bathroom. I had really wanted to take a bath but couldn't bring myself to hit the "on" button on the kettle, as the grasshopper was right next to it (and we're talking a *huge* grasshopper here). So, I boiled water downstairs in the kitchen instead. I'm trying to get used to the lovely wildlife around our house, but it's taking some time. Kwase made a pretty good point when she asked why I was brave enough to study in Nigeria but couldn't shoo away a grasshopper.....
Bernd arrives on Wednesday, and I'm really excited to see him. We've already been apart for longer than any other time since we've been married. He's under strict instructions to bring lots of chocolate with him, as I'm in acute chocolate-withdrawal at the moment. I've even heard some rumors about a package of marzipan being sent from Germany to NY with the express purpose of bringing it to Nigeria. But I'm trying not to be too nosy about that.... We'll see if that transpires. OK, thanks to everyone who has been sending me comments. They're really fun to read - keep them coming!
Monday, October 15, 2007
October 15
Day 12 in Kaduna, and my project is slowly starting to swing into action. I had my first research assistant meeting today, in one of the rooms I've rented in a small development NGO office at the center of town. Right now, my staff is five people, though I'm hoping to expand to eight by the time we start the survey. This morning, we introduced ourselves to each other and then we did our own "focus-group-discussion" (FGD) of my questionnaire. The feedback from my RAs was incredibly thorough and I am going to make some revisions based on their comments. We also spent a good deal of time pouring over my huge Kaduna map and weighing the pros and cons of different neigbhorhoods to sample from. There is consensus on the handful of areas worst-affected by the 2000 riots, and that is where we plan to sample from first. We also divided up the task of visiting community leaders over the next few days to gain permission to work in their areas over the next six weeks. All in all, the level of discussion was extremely high, and everyone is in good spirits about the project.
I also traveled up to Kaduna North to visit Arewa House - a think-tank associated with Ahmadu Bello University (one of the best universities in northern Nigeria), to discuss my research plans, and ask for a letter of affiliation for the RAs to carry with them. To my surprise, I was able to see the director right away, who offered me tea and gave me a 30 minute lecture on why he thinks the riots took place ("it is not about religion, you see, but it is all about uneven economic development"). But he took my project very seriously, gave me lots of advice about what kinds of permission to seek, and even read through my questionnaire and gave me some solid feedback. And he wrote me a letter on the spot! I couldn't believe it. My typical experience with requests like this is that they take days, or even weeks, to go through.
From here, we spend the next few days introducing ourselves to district heads in the neighborhoods where we want to work, and on Friday I'm leading a full-day RA training, where we will go over human subjects/IRB guidelines and practice administering the survey. I don't have much experience managing people, so it will be interesting to see how things turn out.
Otherwise, life has been fairly quiet here. The most exciting thing that's happened recently is that Kwase asked me to come to church with her, so I came along yesterday. It was quite an experience. She attends the Evangelical Church of West Africa (ECWA), an extremely conservative church, as far as I could tell, as I had to cover my head. Kwase gave me a scarf which I tied around my head babushka-style. The congregation was huge - at least 500 people. To my great embarrassment, I was asked to stand up to be welcomed by the pastor. I also had to stand up before communion, and was asked by the pastor through his booming microphone-enhanced voice, something like "were you ah-massed?" I started at him awkwardly in front of the entire crowd, until I eventually figured out that he was asking me if I was baptised by *immersion* in water. Although technically I think I just had some water sprinkled on my head when I was a baby, I nodded vigorously, and he let me sit down and eat the square of bread in peace.
Most interestingly, though, at the end of the service, the pastor made an annoucement based on breaking news he had just received. The evening before, a Christian had allegedly been murdered by several Muslims in a rough part of town after an argument got out of control. The pastor wasted no time giving the details of the incident to the visibly upset audience and urged his parishoners to be very cautious about where they walk at night. It was interesting to me to see the church used to give information about sectarian violence. While this pastor was very restrained, I couldn't help but wonder if other pastors were giving a less restrained message elsewhere around town.
I also traveled up to Kaduna North to visit Arewa House - a think-tank associated with Ahmadu Bello University (one of the best universities in northern Nigeria), to discuss my research plans, and ask for a letter of affiliation for the RAs to carry with them. To my surprise, I was able to see the director right away, who offered me tea and gave me a 30 minute lecture on why he thinks the riots took place ("it is not about religion, you see, but it is all about uneven economic development"). But he took my project very seriously, gave me lots of advice about what kinds of permission to seek, and even read through my questionnaire and gave me some solid feedback. And he wrote me a letter on the spot! I couldn't believe it. My typical experience with requests like this is that they take days, or even weeks, to go through.
From here, we spend the next few days introducing ourselves to district heads in the neighborhoods where we want to work, and on Friday I'm leading a full-day RA training, where we will go over human subjects/IRB guidelines and practice administering the survey. I don't have much experience managing people, so it will be interesting to see how things turn out.
Otherwise, life has been fairly quiet here. The most exciting thing that's happened recently is that Kwase asked me to come to church with her, so I came along yesterday. It was quite an experience. She attends the Evangelical Church of West Africa (ECWA), an extremely conservative church, as far as I could tell, as I had to cover my head. Kwase gave me a scarf which I tied around my head babushka-style. The congregation was huge - at least 500 people. To my great embarrassment, I was asked to stand up to be welcomed by the pastor. I also had to stand up before communion, and was asked by the pastor through his booming microphone-enhanced voice, something like "were you ah-massed?" I started at him awkwardly in front of the entire crowd, until I eventually figured out that he was asking me if I was baptised by *immersion* in water. Although technically I think I just had some water sprinkled on my head when I was a baby, I nodded vigorously, and he let me sit down and eat the square of bread in peace.
Most interestingly, though, at the end of the service, the pastor made an annoucement based on breaking news he had just received. The evening before, a Christian had allegedly been murdered by several Muslims in a rough part of town after an argument got out of control. The pastor wasted no time giving the details of the incident to the visibly upset audience and urged his parishoners to be very cautious about where they walk at night. It was interesting to me to see the church used to give information about sectarian violence. While this pastor was very restrained, I couldn't help but wonder if other pastors were giving a less restrained message elsewhere around town.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Kaduna Oct 12
I've been in Kaduna now for almost six days. There have been some research ups and downs, but I think things are going well overall. I've hired a local NGO-worker and friend as a "consultant" for the next week to help me find high-quality RAs. I've found two people already whom I really like and want to hire, and am meeting several others tomorrow. I've also found an office that I'd like to rent (if they accept my offer) to use for administering my questionnaire. The big challenge in the next week will be fine-tuning my sampling strategy and deciding exactly where to send my RAs to first recruit respondents.
I've gone through my questionnaire with a few people here and so far am getting what seems to be very good feedback. I don't seem to have been way off-base on most of my questions, though I've been alerted to a few questions that will be hard for people to understand. So far, as much as I love it, people haven't been crazy about my one-chicken versus the gamble scenairo question (for those of you who have seen my survey). They much preferred the risk question that focuses on keeping a stable job versus a risky but potentially high-yielding job. But chickens sort of seem strange to people, I guess.
Otherwise, it has been a holiday here yesterday and today, as it's the end of Ramadan. I went to what I thought would be a smally family barbeque at a Hausa Muslim friend's house last night, only to find a huge bash of about 70 people eating and dancing (though no alcohol of course, which made the dancing part a bit rough for me). I'd never been to a party quite like this before. The parents of the people throwing the party were away in Saudi Arabia for the holiday, the crowd was almost entirely twenty-somethings, yet everyone was impeccably well-behaved and kind of on the quiet side. Girls chatted and danced with girls, and guys with guys, and there were plenty of hijabs to be seen (though many of the girls weren't wearing them). The crowd was quite wealthy, it seemed, as almost everyone I met had either been to the UK or the US at least once. The food was incredibly spicy - jollof rice that nearly blew my head off, and several other spicy meat dishes were washed down with high-sugar pineapple juice. Really nice overall, although I felt a bit out of place at times and they had hired a photorapher for the event who kept snapping me dancing (incredibly awkwardly, I'm sure).
Today is a slow day, though, thanks to the public holiday. I'm working on scripts for the RAs to use in the field and in the office right now, sitting in a hotel lobby while Nigerian club football is on TV. There's not too much else to report today, though my roommate took me shoping and I found a great vegetable market and a good shop where I bought soy sauce, sliced bread and even nutella! This will really help diversify my diet (which, up until now has consisted of spaghetti with tomatoes and onions almost every night). Hopefully, by the next time I send an update, I'll have a successful RA meeting behind me and have eaten a decent stir-fry. For anyone reading this, definitely send me emails, it's quite lonely here....
I've gone through my questionnaire with a few people here and so far am getting what seems to be very good feedback. I don't seem to have been way off-base on most of my questions, though I've been alerted to a few questions that will be hard for people to understand. So far, as much as I love it, people haven't been crazy about my one-chicken versus the gamble scenairo question (for those of you who have seen my survey). They much preferred the risk question that focuses on keeping a stable job versus a risky but potentially high-yielding job. But chickens sort of seem strange to people, I guess.
Otherwise, it has been a holiday here yesterday and today, as it's the end of Ramadan. I went to what I thought would be a smally family barbeque at a Hausa Muslim friend's house last night, only to find a huge bash of about 70 people eating and dancing (though no alcohol of course, which made the dancing part a bit rough for me). I'd never been to a party quite like this before. The parents of the people throwing the party were away in Saudi Arabia for the holiday, the crowd was almost entirely twenty-somethings, yet everyone was impeccably well-behaved and kind of on the quiet side. Girls chatted and danced with girls, and guys with guys, and there were plenty of hijabs to be seen (though many of the girls weren't wearing them). The crowd was quite wealthy, it seemed, as almost everyone I met had either been to the UK or the US at least once. The food was incredibly spicy - jollof rice that nearly blew my head off, and several other spicy meat dishes were washed down with high-sugar pineapple juice. Really nice overall, although I felt a bit out of place at times and they had hired a photorapher for the event who kept snapping me dancing (incredibly awkwardly, I'm sure).
Today is a slow day, though, thanks to the public holiday. I'm working on scripts for the RAs to use in the field and in the office right now, sitting in a hotel lobby while Nigerian club football is on TV. There's not too much else to report today, though my roommate took me shoping and I found a great vegetable market and a good shop where I bought soy sauce, sliced bread and even nutella! This will really help diversify my diet (which, up until now has consisted of spaghetti with tomatoes and onions almost every night). Hopefully, by the next time I send an update, I'll have a successful RA meeting behind me and have eaten a decent stir-fry. For anyone reading this, definitely send me emails, it's quite lonely here....
Monday, October 8, 2007
Kaduna Oct 8
After a beautiful drive north from Abuja yesterday afternoon, I'm safely ensconced in Kaduna. The rainy season is just ending, so everything is incredibly green compared with my last visit here in July 2006. I caught a (free) ride up here with a young man named Abubakar, whose brother, Mohammad, works for the National Democratic Institute in Abuja. Since we were trapped in a car for 3 hours anyway, I took the opportunity to ask him about a million quesitons about the Kaduna riots in 2000 and 2002, since he and his family were present for both. I also played the "how popular are different first names" game, since I'm hoping to use questions like "How many people named Salisu" do you know in my survey as a measure of a respondent's overall network size. After an hour or so of deliberations, Abubakar recommended the following Muslim names - Salisu, Tijjani and Zakari - for men, and Hannatu, Halim and Saudatu for women. He ruled out Mohammad, Abubakar, Ahmed, Abudul and Abdullahi as too common for me, and Aisha as too common for women.
He also told me that there is an office that issues birth certificates, and might even have a register of names of Kaduna residents. I'm not holding my breath, but this would be a more systematic way of discovering which names occur with the appropriate frequency (between 1 and 5 % of the population) to use in "How many Xs do you know" questions.
After an impressively smooth ride - we were only stopped at one police "check-point," where a policeman with a rifle tried without directly asking for dash (a bribe in Nigerian lingo) to get dash out of us. I was completely clueless, but the policeman kept smiling at me and saying "am I having a happy Sunday? Is it a happy Sunday?" Finally, the policeman turned to Abubakar and said, "does she speak English," and Abu replied "not *your* type of English." But he gave him a crip 20 Naira bill and then we were allowed to continue on our way. We talked a bit about the plight of the police - since they receive virtually no training and are paid so little, it's perhaps not surprising that they have trouble getting the job done, and seek dash in every corner.
I arrived at Kwase's place around 5 pm and liked her, and her slightly odd house, right away. After a somewhat awkward conversation in which she told me that she didn't like to talk about why she doesn' t have a husband or children (the last things on my mind at that point), we settled into a discussion of research design and the difficulties of choosing a dissertation topic. I then handed a copy of KKV to her, as well as a few books on qualitative and quantitative analysis, and then I think we became friends. Kwase's house has definitely got character - she's pained the walls bright yellows and organges, and the kitchen red. There is running water (but no shower) upstairs, so it will be a plastic-bucket routine in the bathroom. My bedroom is nice and she and her steward helped me put up my mosquito net. There is a bit of an ant problem, but hopefully I'll get used to it, without panicking and spraying intense amounts of chemicals everytime I see a bug. All in all, it seems like a good set-up and it's really affordable, so I'll have plenty of money to spend in internet cafes working on my project and my blog...
He also told me that there is an office that issues birth certificates, and might even have a register of names of Kaduna residents. I'm not holding my breath, but this would be a more systematic way of discovering which names occur with the appropriate frequency (between 1 and 5 % of the population) to use in "How many Xs do you know" questions.
After an impressively smooth ride - we were only stopped at one police "check-point," where a policeman with a rifle tried without directly asking for dash (a bribe in Nigerian lingo) to get dash out of us. I was completely clueless, but the policeman kept smiling at me and saying "am I having a happy Sunday? Is it a happy Sunday?" Finally, the policeman turned to Abubakar and said, "does she speak English," and Abu replied "not *your* type of English." But he gave him a crip 20 Naira bill and then we were allowed to continue on our way. We talked a bit about the plight of the police - since they receive virtually no training and are paid so little, it's perhaps not surprising that they have trouble getting the job done, and seek dash in every corner.
I arrived at Kwase's place around 5 pm and liked her, and her slightly odd house, right away. After a somewhat awkward conversation in which she told me that she didn't like to talk about why she doesn' t have a husband or children (the last things on my mind at that point), we settled into a discussion of research design and the difficulties of choosing a dissertation topic. I then handed a copy of KKV to her, as well as a few books on qualitative and quantitative analysis, and then I think we became friends. Kwase's house has definitely got character - she's pained the walls bright yellows and organges, and the kitchen red. There is running water (but no shower) upstairs, so it will be a plastic-bucket routine in the bathroom. My bedroom is nice and she and her steward helped me put up my mosquito net. There is a bit of an ant problem, but hopefully I'll get used to it, without panicking and spraying intense amounts of chemicals everytime I see a bug. All in all, it seems like a good set-up and it's really affordable, so I'll have plenty of money to spend in internet cafes working on my project and my blog...
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Abuja Day 3
Day 3 in Abuja has been slow, but rather relaxing. After confirming my travel plans to Kaduna for tomorrow, I made a few work-related calls (only about half of which actually went through as something seems to be up with the MTN network today). The biggest news of today is that I found the most wonderful place - Cafe Salamander - on the south side of the city (whereas I am living at the very northern end). It's a lovely place with free wireless, reliable electricity, yellow and orange painted walls, and everyone is even wearing purple shirts (my favorite color, for anyone who didn't know that already...). I ordered a salad (yes! vegetables!) and a coffee and have been working here blissfully quietly and peacefully almost all day. This works well as government offices are closed anyway today.
The ride (thanks once again to Onyeka) here was beautiful, as I saw a completely different, and much nicer, side of the city. There is a stunning view of Aso rock and the surrounding hills and forrests when traveling south along the western highway in the city. And there are a few public parks (though, sadly, residential areas were razed in order to create most of them, and I'm not sure if residents were compensated), that apparently have crocodiles in rivers inside them.
I've been thinking a bit about how the economy is so ethnicized here. (Not that this is so different from New York). All of the money-changers are Hausa men. And all of the car repair shops/gas stations/spare parts places are run by Igbos. While I can see how hiring within families perpetuates this ethnic division of labor, I find it puzzling how it all gets started in the first place. One hypothesis - offered to me by a Nigerian man who is an interior decorator whom I met at a dinner last night at an Indian restaurant/expat NGO-worker hangout - about the Igbo in particular is that they used to be dominant in the military under British rule, but after the civil war, they all lost their jobs and were forced to find other work. Totally banned from any government jobs, Igbos went into trade and started filling important niches. An interesting thought, at least. How trade wound up equalling spare parts is anyone's guess. I'm especially curious about the Hausa money-changers. One idea is that maybe they were given priviledged status in this area by the British (whom many say favored the Hausa in general government administration jobs).
Tonight, I'm supposed to try a local "fish bar" - an outdoor place where you can eat grilled whole fish and listen to music outdoors. Sounds quite nice. It will be a nice way to finish things off in Abuja before heading to do my real work for the next two months.
The ride (thanks once again to Onyeka) here was beautiful, as I saw a completely different, and much nicer, side of the city. There is a stunning view of Aso rock and the surrounding hills and forrests when traveling south along the western highway in the city. And there are a few public parks (though, sadly, residential areas were razed in order to create most of them, and I'm not sure if residents were compensated), that apparently have crocodiles in rivers inside them.
I've been thinking a bit about how the economy is so ethnicized here. (Not that this is so different from New York). All of the money-changers are Hausa men. And all of the car repair shops/gas stations/spare parts places are run by Igbos. While I can see how hiring within families perpetuates this ethnic division of labor, I find it puzzling how it all gets started in the first place. One hypothesis - offered to me by a Nigerian man who is an interior decorator whom I met at a dinner last night at an Indian restaurant/expat NGO-worker hangout - about the Igbo in particular is that they used to be dominant in the military under British rule, but after the civil war, they all lost their jobs and were forced to find other work. Totally banned from any government jobs, Igbos went into trade and started filling important niches. An interesting thought, at least. How trade wound up equalling spare parts is anyone's guess. I'm especially curious about the Hausa money-changers. One idea is that maybe they were given priviledged status in this area by the British (whom many say favored the Hausa in general government administration jobs).
Tonight, I'm supposed to try a local "fish bar" - an outdoor place where you can eat grilled whole fish and listen to music outdoors. Sounds quite nice. It will be a nice way to finish things off in Abuja before heading to do my real work for the next two months.
Day 2 in Abuja
After a very soft landing and smooth trip from the airport, thanks to Onyeka, my Igbo taxi driver, I'm alive and well in Abuja. I spent my first day here mostly asleep, to be perfectly honest, thanks to never being able to sleep on airplanes... But today has been a busy day - I visited the US Embassy this morning and "registered my presence" in the country, through a rather interesting exchange with a consular officer ("You're staying here for 3 months? Um, why?") and an even more interesting exchange with the security guard on my way out - "What? You are here alone? Madam, please don't go to the Niger Delta, OK?," which I found to be wise advice.
I spent most of the rest of the day at the NPC - the National Population Commission - the shell of an office that manages the population censuses. After meeting about six different "chairmen" of various sub-disciplines and areas, I was finally taken to the "CTA" (which I eventually figured out means Chief Technology Officer" - an Indian man from Punjab, I discovered much to mysurprise. Even more surprising was the fact that he was commissioner-general of the 2005 Indian census, and now he's managing technical aspects of the 2006 Nigerian census. When I asked him how this happened, he suggested strongly that he wanted some excitement in his life, so moved here and took a joint job with the NPC and the UNDP. Anyway, to make a long, long story short - I eventually got some data, and a commitment for a huge set of electronic datasets to be emailed to me next week. We'll see how that goes. Though, I must admit I was reassured that his office in particular had about 15 computers and lots of really energetic staff (unlike most other government offices I've been to in Abuja). He also asked me to give a presentation to his staff on how political scientists use census data, which I thought was funny and kind of endearing. I gave a few of the staff a short talk on a paper I'd written using some data from the National Bureau of Statistics in Abuja, sort of hoping to play off the competition between the two agencies. It seemed to work, as a few of the staffers in the CTAs office said they would like me to write a paper with their data, too!
Other than that, I've been caught in a rainstorm (a massive one), though supposedly the rainy season is supposed to be over now, and managed to score a bargain on a stabilizer for my computer, so it doesn't explode. Hopefully things will speed up day by day, but for now I suppose I can be happy that the US govt knows I'm here, I may get some interesting census data, and my computer is unlikely to blow up on me.
I'm missing New York quite a lot already, though...
I spent most of the rest of the day at the NPC - the National Population Commission - the shell of an office that manages the population censuses. After meeting about six different "chairmen" of various sub-disciplines and areas, I was finally taken to the "CTA" (which I eventually figured out means Chief Technology Officer" - an Indian man from Punjab, I discovered much to mysurprise. Even more surprising was the fact that he was commissioner-general of the 2005 Indian census, and now he's managing technical aspects of the 2006 Nigerian census. When I asked him how this happened, he suggested strongly that he wanted some excitement in his life, so moved here and took a joint job with the NPC and the UNDP. Anyway, to make a long, long story short - I eventually got some data, and a commitment for a huge set of electronic datasets to be emailed to me next week. We'll see how that goes. Though, I must admit I was reassured that his office in particular had about 15 computers and lots of really energetic staff (unlike most other government offices I've been to in Abuja). He also asked me to give a presentation to his staff on how political scientists use census data, which I thought was funny and kind of endearing. I gave a few of the staff a short talk on a paper I'd written using some data from the National Bureau of Statistics in Abuja, sort of hoping to play off the competition between the two agencies. It seemed to work, as a few of the staffers in the CTAs office said they would like me to write a paper with their data, too!
Other than that, I've been caught in a rainstorm (a massive one), though supposedly the rainy season is supposed to be over now, and managed to score a bargain on a stabilizer for my computer, so it doesn't explode. Hopefully things will speed up day by day, but for now I suppose I can be happy that the US govt knows I'm here, I may get some interesting census data, and my computer is unlikely to blow up on me.
I'm missing New York quite a lot already, though...
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Less than 3 days to go...
Well, I have my ticket and visa in hand (after three visits to the Nigerian consulate, one of which involved a hilarious group trip to an internet cafe with several Nigerians applying for passports, to fill out a Byzantine maze of online forms....), I'm mostly packed, and am getting myself mentally ready for nearly three months in northern Nigeria. Very happily, it seems I have a place to stay in Kaduna, the main place I'll be based this trip, with an ethnusiastic sociology Ph.D. student at ABU named Kwase. She seems very smart and serious - she's offered me a significant rent-reduction if I bring her books on research design for her thesis. I can't wait to meet her and get settled in Kaduna.
This is my first blog, so I haven't quite figured out what sorts of things to post here, but my plan is to check in every few days with research and general travel adventure stories from the field. If my last visit to Nigeria (for two months in summer 2006) is any indication, there should be plenty to share.
This is my first blog, so I haven't quite figured out what sorts of things to post here, but my plan is to check in every few days with research and general travel adventure stories from the field. If my last visit to Nigeria (for two months in summer 2006) is any indication, there should be plenty to share.
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