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On Saturday, I was having a drink with my fellow British volunteer, Richard, and he said it was our six month anniversary, a little confused, I asked for clarification, six months since we arrived in Nigeria. Yes six months ago, Richard, Heather and I stumbled off a flight from Heathrow to Abuja at 05:30am into hot hot Nigeria.
Well hot hot Nigeria, has become cold wet Nigeria, it goes down to 22°C at night and I have a blanket on my bed! The obvious question of course is what if anything have I achieved, or if you are VSO, have I “shared skills and changed lives?”
I’m a bit of a realist about what I expect to achieve, I even have a document at work that I add to occasionally called “Small, small achievements!"
So here is a list of achievements…..
1 – Skill shared, I helped Ugochi prepare for her telephone interview for the Climate Change Media Fellowship, you can read about it here and here
2 – Languages – very basic greetings in Pidgin and Hausa, ina kwana, ina auni, lafia, how dei, I dei fine, well done, sannu.
3 – Inches lost around my waist, at least that is what the tailor told me last time she measured me, and probably at least 3 inches gained on the length of my hair, as I haven't managed to achieve a hair cut yet, next months challenge!
4 – States visited, I live in Abuja, which is in Federal Capital Territory or FCT, the Centre of Unity, but I have been to Kano, Centre of Commerce, Kaduna, the Liberal State, Nassarawa, the Home of Solid Minerals, where I met the Deputy Governor, and Niger, the Power State, where there were still power cuts! Look at my map to see where I have been.
5 – Church services attended - Family Worship Centre, Baptist, Methodist, Summit, Redeemed, these are marked on my Abuja map.
6 – Oibo I love you! – Well actually I didn’t count but a certain number of men have claimed to be in love with me, want to marry me and so on!
7 – New outfits, one of the great things I’m enjoying about Nigeria is buying fabric and getting it made up, pictures here.
8 – Exercise, 4 times running, 4 times swimming, rather poor for six months I know but it was very hot when we arrived, and I’m working on it, but I have lost three inches!
9 – New types of food, egusi, vegetable soup, bitter leaf soup, pounded yam, eba, semovita, jollof rice, suya, shawarm – I will write about food another time, but if you would like to you can look at this great blog post by Richard, a different Richard!
10 – Haven’t made it to 10 yet! – but I have passed one module of my MSc since I have been here.
Mmm well let’s hope that after 12 months I have some more concrete achievements to share with you.
Pride comes before a fall, and following my recent blog posts about how wonderfully reliable our electricity has been, I got home last night to find there was none. I cooked and studied by candlelight, used two batteries for my laptop, and slept with the windows closed and my ears stopped with ear plugs against the sound of my neighbours generators. And I heard there was a strike.
Now I am at work where we have apparently 36 hours of battery back up, and I found this wonderful story from panapress which I really have to share with you, in the interest of acknowledging my souces, I found it at http://www.panapress.com/freenews.asp?code=eng057805&dte=25/08/2010 and as for the normally well-lit glistening streets of Abuja, can somebody tell me where they are please?
Nigeria's electricity workers on strike
Lagos, Nigeria (PANA) - Nigeria's 40,000 electricity workers Wednesday embarked on an indefinite nationwide strike to press for payment of "monetisation" arrears, but most Nigerians who are already used to poor power supply are shrugging off the strike.
The few hours of electricity usually enjoyed by residents of most cities across Africa's most populous nation were cut due to the strike.
"We told all our members to stay at home and all the power stations in the country have been shut down," said workers' spokesman Temple Iworimo.
But government spokesman Labaran Maku said the situation is under control, and that the government will do all it can to resolve the problem.
"In the next couple of days, those issues (payments of arrears of allowances) would be resolved," said Maku, who is the junior Minister of Information.
On Wednesday night, the normally well-lit streets of the glistening capital city of Abuja were plunged into darkness, except in areas that were lit by solar-powered lights.
"Most streets here are in darkness. That's how you will know there is a strike ," Adebayo Ojo, an Abuja resident, told PANA.
Apart from street lights, most Nigerians, who provide their own electricity using power generators, are oblivious of the strike.
"What difference does it make?" queried Innocent Chukwu, a Lagos resident. "We have not had light in our area for weeks. Let them continue the strike for as long as they wish."
Nigeria, with a population of 150 million, generates about 3,000 megawatts of electricity, which is inadequate to power the vast country.
Most homes and businesses depend on power generators for electricity, as the government monopoly Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) cannot meet their electricity demands.
Lagos - 25/08/2010
Its hard to tell what Nigeria is really like when you work in an air-conditioned office in the capital city with colleagues who lobby the government, but perhaps reading this will give you more of an idea.
As plagiarism is the biggest from of flattery here is a link to Simon's blog. Simon is a volunteer based in Kaduna, (around three hours North of Abuja) working in the primary education sector. This blog post has some shocking statistics about primary schools in Kaduna state, which apparently is one of the better ones!
Click here to read Simon's blog
More NEPA / PHCN stories, for a reminder that stands for Nigeria Electric Power Authority / Never Expect Power Again and Power Holding Company of Nigeria / Problem Has Changed Name, for more info read my two previous posts Paying for Nepa or not? and PHCN became PHGA.
So after paying 20,000 Naira for our electricity two weeks ago, and finally getting re-connected we receive another bill for 17,800 Naira that says it is for June and July, its dated 29th July and that was the day we paid the previous bill.
So off I go to PHCN, first to customer service, then I am directed to the second office on the right. The customer service office is a clean air conditioned office where two staff sit with desks and computers and chairs for the waiting customers. The place I am directed to resembles a classroom with rows of desks, and a bookshelf at the back, and rather worryingly no papers, or computers - so how on earth do they track my electricity consumption?
This is the room of the "marketeers" which I found out are the people who "manage" my power supply, ie make sure I have paid, disconnect if I haven't, re-connect if I have. I am told I have to wait to see Helen, who looks after my area, she should be here sometime after nine, (it was around 8:30) so I sit and quietly fume about the inefficiency, why can't someone else see me, why have they sent me an incorrect bill, why are they wasting my time etc etc?
However when Helen arrives I change my mind, and wander if this really is customer service, she explains the bill to me, tells me where I have to pay, gives me until the end of the month to pay, and gives me her phone number in case I ever need to contact her if I can't pay on time, so that she won't have to disconnect.
So this customer service had me waiting for the right person to turn up, but at home, I could have been on the phone, on hold, transferred between many different people who ask me all the things I've already told the last person!
And for the record, the NEPA has almost become AEPN (always expect power now), this could be due to the rain, (as some of Nigeria's power is generated from hydro), or the cooler climate (fewer people turning on the AC) or maybe it is Goodluck himself, who when he was sworn in as President promised to take personal responsibility for the power sector.
We frequently lose power for about half an hour in the morning, after it is light, I notice as the ceiling fan stops going round, and occasionally at night, normally by the time I have found a candle, it comes back. I'm not looking forward to the dry season, and the resumption of hot candlelit nights, disturbed by the noise of generators.
Well done and Sannu are often heard phrases here, you don't seem to have to have done anything well, or done anything at all. But well done Ugochi, whose facebook status says: "thank you God, I was among the 40 journalists selected out of thousands of applications from all over the world for the fellowship, happiest day of my life"
My last blog was about supporting Ugochi to prepare for a telephone interview, well she was succesful, it is for training in climate change journalism and funding to attend the Mexico Climate Change conference in December.
The in my opinion rather cool picture is of Angie (left) and Ugochi (right). Sadly for us, and happily for Angie's family she is currently on a plane flying back to Canada via the UK. Angie worked as a VSO volunteer with ICEED for a year, supporting work on Communications, and really welcomed me to ICEED and Nigeria, thank you Angie.
Sharing Skills and Changing Lives - (for the uninitiated this is the VSO motto!)
I sometimes wander why I am here, yes its interesting I am learning, but am I helping Nigeria, or even one Nigerian?
Well this morning I received this text message:
"Tank u Emily for ur support. d interview went well. just d same things you asked me. tanks a lot"
Working in "development" sometimes feels like an "industry" of its own, and to be honest it sometimes feels like convincing donors to make rich Nigerians richer. I work for an organisation that sees itself as affecting policy at the highest level, ie Federal Government, in order to reduce poverty, which of course is important but it takes time and feels rather abstract, and has little to do with grassroots level actions which I am used to. Talking to Nigerians about using individuals to influence government policy is met with hilarity, bewilderment, and statements like "you don't know how things work in Nigeria", this is true and I am trying to learn.
So when I got the above text message this morning, it bought a tear to my eye, yes I know that's not difficult. It was sent from a colleague Ugochi, who works for a radio station, and is with ICEED as an intern to learn more about climate change. She has a radio programme called Green Angle on ASO radio (you can listen on line, Tuesdays 09:30am) and applied to the Climate Change Media Fellowship to attend a nine month training for journalists and then to attend the Cancun meeting in Mexico. Yesterday she had an email to invite her for a telephone interview at 6pm.
So, Velice my Kenyan colleague also VSO, and I conducted a mock interview, with me in role of interviewer and Velice as observer. I asked "if you could interview President Obama what would you ask him?", "how do you prepare for your radio programme?" and "tell me about a difficult situation you have faced live on radio and how you handled it?"
Ugochi has experienced the effects of climate change in her village and wants to understand the issues better and use art and media to educate people to create change. If she is selected she hopes on her return to Nigeria to train journalists and grassroots organisations to build their response to climate change in Nigeria.
So the good news is Problem Has Gone Away, ie electricity is back, this will only make sense if you read the previous post, scroll down or click here
So we returned from work on Thursday, to find there was no power, and to observe that they (PHCN) had taken our fuse, I counselled colleagues and fellow volunteers on what to do next and heard three approaches to solving the problem:
- phone whoever told you it would be done (aah hindsight, why didn't I get the number?) until it is done
- pay a bribe
- get your own fuse
Actually we did none of these, we went to the office on Monday around 3pm, and the staff remembered us, and greeted us as if we had just come to say Hi. They were mystified when we told them we were still waiting for re-connection. They sent someone with us to sort it out straight away, he was surpised to find that we didn't have a car, and he would have to walk to our house, but he came and plugged in the fuse, and power returned.
At work we proudly told them that we had sorted it, without money changing hands and were warned of trouble to come!
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