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.
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