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...
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