Life in Jos/ Feeling Conflicted about Paul Theroux

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!