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...