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