The new semester

After the fun of the new year spent in Akwanga with my friend Moha (thank goodness he's a popular guy with a car, as the burning rubbish in the road and excitable youths running around with big sticks demanding money from passing vehicles would have proven a lot more intimidating if he wasn't!), it was back to work last week. This semester I've started taking some lectures in the College on Early Reading skills for the Primary Education Studies Department. There's also a new department called 'Early Childhood Care Education', which I've been gathering materials for and will be taking students for the course on Child Development. CRD is good. We've started the year off by planning activities to educate the students on HIV/AIDS on Valentine's Day. We're also carrying out research in the College on academic departments in order to organise seminars and forums to discuss issues that staff have and how departments can link up in terms of skills sharing. We're also very happy to have Manga back. He's come back fully loaded from the UK with ideas about how to improve the College's use of instructional technology (computers, projectors, video etc), so I'm also on hand to offer advice (at some point in my history I seem to remember doing a degree in video media, which makes me a bit useful for this!).

This week I’ve been in a workshop in Abuja on gender mainstreaming. It’s interesting to spend time with various people from different Nigerian organisations thinking about how women and men can achieve equality. Today we had an interesting discussion about the role of women and religion. As the two main religions here are Islam and Christianity, people from each of those religions were asked to tell the group their approach to gender, and there was an Indian VSO volunteer, Shreela, here, so she offered to give the Hindu perspective on gender roles.

It seems that religion can be bent to the needs and traditions of cultures, political differences and anger, and it is the effects of this that so often provides the face of Islam. It is foolish to ignore or belittle how sensitive and delicate the world is, and I think that the words and images that are proliferated by news networks are doing enormous damage to this fragility. All we have to do is ask questions, which is what we have been doing over the past few days...

The lady that spoke about Islam was from the Kano College of Education. Basically, the Qur’anic rendition of Adam and Eve sees them as being created as equal. “Allah originated them from a single person, or one soul.” Thusly, women and men have the same religious duties and responsibilities and should face the same consequences.

Sharia Law recognises the full rights of women before and after marriage. They have right to property and women may keep their maiden names after marriage out of respect to their parents. After marriage, women can acquire all the wealth of their husbands. If she works, she has to keep her earnings for herself, as it is the man who is the bread winner. The exception to this rule is if the husband cannot work due to illness and if there is a personal arrangement between them. In the case of divorce or widowhood, she’s entitled to full financial support for one year afterwards or until she remarries. Men are entitled to inherit twice as much as women because they have more financial responsibilities. Women save theirs for personal security and aren’t responsible for spending it on their own family.

A child raised in marriage is entitled to financial support. A child born outside of a marriage, even if the parents marry after its birth, has no legal rights.

Women’s role in society as mothers and wives is crucial. They are entitled to work, but only with the consent of their husbands. There is nothing that precludes women from taking leadership positions. The only exception is that they are not allowed to lead men in prayer. They can lead other women, but not men.

Women’s consent is crucial to marriage. There is no forced marriage in Islam, so if it does happen, it can be annulled.

Finally, education is not just a need, but a right for both men and women.

“Seeking knowledge is mandatory for all Muslims.”

All in all, it was an interesting few days, with varied discussion, and as it was in Abuja, I've been able to update this blog!

I’ll sign off for now, so will try and keep you posted soon. Happy new year! Lx

Christmas 09

The pictures on this page are (from top to bottom (I still can't shift them round to make them fit right on the page)):
Anita Aparshe, Abraham Aparshe and John Okereke enjoying my atlas, Abraham again with a toothpick, John again, Mrs Monde the Provost of the College, Dan Aparshe (the dad) with little Rihina from upstairs, a spectaular pair of jeans that I spotted at the Miss Akwanga Pageant on New Years Day, a group of volunteers enjoying a night out in Abuja, me with my hair braided, Janet and Augustine Aparshe, me again, guys playing in a basketball tournament in Akwanga. (The Aparshes and the Okerekes are my neighbours.)





















Christmas
The weekend before Christmas I went to Abuja for my friend Angie’s birthday and went out dancing. I was then meant to go down to Calabar, which is on the south coast, for Christmas. The bus company had said that the bus would be leaving Abuja at 7am and passing through Akwanga, so I kept in touch with the driver to know when. The time ticked away and the bus didn’t arrive until 1pm, meaning that we probably wouldn’t arrive in Calabar before midnight. There’s been a fuel crisis recently, so queues from the filling stations are hugely backed up. There was also a lot of congestion on the roads because of Christmas, so I forelornly picked up my backpack and went home. There I found the Aparshe children (my neighbours), who were happy to have me back to join them for Christmas. Christmas Eve was spent preparing food for the following day. I visited Comfort, another neighbour, who was also preparing food and practised a little bit of Mada dancing. Mada is the dominant tribe around here. In the night, around 1.30 in the morning, I spoke to the Stansted crew, who were all around Ed’s enjoying Finnish bun and gingerbread after having been at the pub. It was funny to think of them drunkenly standing around the phone in his mum’s kitchen while I lay in the hot night under my mosquito net.


I woke up early on Christmas morning. My fridge has been on the fritz but had miraculously started working a day earlier, so the Aparshes had stored some veg and meat in there. They came to pick it up and I chipped in by chopping green beans. The plan was to go to Church that morning at 9, but before we went we had some food – spicey rice with vegetables in, coleslaw and meat. So we waddled off to Church, bellies full. Once there, we discovered that the English spoken mass had been earlier and we had joined the Hausa service. ‘Bademwa’, as they say (no problem). Back at home, we went to rest, so chilled out a bit and had a nice call from home where everyone was enjoying opening presents.

Later on in the afternoon I went to visit Comfort and Gudi, my neighbours downstairs and had some more rice and meat and some watermelon. I then went on a little walk to Becky’s house, which is across the campus and in a part of town called Lo-cost. She tried to ply me with more food, but I just took some chicken as I knew she’d been keeping them for some time especially for Christmas. It seems that it’s the custom to go and visit other people’s houses on Christmas Day where you’ll be fed. From there I went to see Mrs Monde (Acting Provost of the College) and we sat outside drinking beer and eating meat. For Woody’s information (ever since some Nigerian couple were on The Restaurant, she’s obsessed with how I must be eating goat all the time!), the traditional meat at Christmas is beef. My neighbours had gone in with a group of 4 to buy a cow, which was slaughtered and divied up on Christmas Eve.

When I got back from Mrs Monde, I visited the Okerekes upstairs, my final visit for the day.

Boxing Day was quiet. I sat and watched some TV with the Okerekes and started to write this. I have a friend coming for dinner, so am cooking some beef that I bought today. It’s a bit of a pain that my fridge is being so temperamental, because it means that things go bad so quickly. I have a list of things to do in the new year though, which includes getting my fans and fridge fixed and building a book shelf for my parlour.

Ghana Dec09

Ghana

Eriye, the wife of David who used to be a volunteer here in Akwanga, has been waiting to get a call for an interview regarding her visa to follow David to Canada. Unfortunately, the office for Canadian visas for West Africa is in Accra, the capital of Ghana. Well, she got the call in September for an interview in December and I went with her to Ghana a few days ahead of it. She was travelling from Port Harcourt (down south) so I flew from Abuja to Lagos to Accra. It was a straight forward journey and when I landed in Accra in the evening, it was very muggy. The airport is right in the city and just a short taxi ride from where we stayed, so pretty easy. We were kindly hosted by Laurie and John, some Canadian missionaries with a church called the Church of the Nazarene that David had known when he used to live in Port Harcourt.

Apart from the sticky weather (highlighted by the fact that the dry season was already underway in Nigeria so I was used to dusty skin and a dry nose), one of the first things that struck me about Accra was the advertisements. In Abuja and the 2 Nigerian airports that I had travelled through, advert hoardings are either bare or taken up with domestic bank or mobile phone promotions. Now I was seeing images for Vodaphone, fashion designers and Pepsi towering over me. For good or bad, it just made the place seem more vibrant and desirable. The roads were also very neat, with trimmed bushes and proper pavements. As we drove through the back streets to a place called Nima, where we were to stay, street vendors seemed familiar, as did the smells.

We saw quite a bit of Accra by jumping in taxis to the market and combined this with sitting by the swimming pool. There was a lovely area down in the southern part of the town called James Town where we enjoyed some chicken and chips by the sea. Laurie’s food was also a treat n we enjoyed Chilli con Carni with real cheese!

Eriye was very anxious about her interview. She didn’t know quite what to expect but was hoping that she would pass so that she could soon travel to Canada. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. She came out upset because they had doubted the validity of their marriage certificate that had been issued in Akwanga a year and a half ago. So it’s a case of back to the drawing board and I’m going to see what I can do this end to try and verify their marriage. Who knows how long the process will take. It’s a very big deal moving so far from home to somewhere so different. It’s not something to be taken lightly and something that Manga, my colleague who has just returned from a 3 month placement at a University in London discovered (I’ll come to that at a later date).

Anyway, to add the disappointment of the day, after leaving the Canadian Embassy, Eriye got her handbag stolen in the market. I hadn’t seen her put it down next to me and a few minutes later it was gone. It had her passport, phone, diary and money in it. Not a good day. We then went on a tour of the town trying to put work out how she was going to get home after the fiasco. We went back to the Canadian Embassy and got the photocopy that they had of her passport and made our way to the Nigerian Embassy (I’m sure one or both of those places is called a High Commission rather than an Embassy due to the Commonwealth, but I can’t be bothered to interrupt my flow to check). It has to be noted at this point the differences between the two embassies. The Canadian has a thick gate with guards and when a car enters it has to open its bonnet and have its undercarriage checked with a large horizontal mirror thing on wheels before it can enter the next security guarded fence. We also had to leave our electronic devices at the gate and be sweeped with an airport beepy stick. The Nigerian embassy, on the other hand, allowed us to walk in to find a sleepy looking woman in the security office who asked us to leave our bags. Anyway, it must be nice not to have anyone wanting to blow you up. Back to our mission. The long and short of it is that they couldn’t do anything until the morning but did suggest that the bus company who she travelled with to Ghana might be able to help. At their office, they said that it’s possible to pass through the border but that the photocopy and a police report would help. Next stop was the police station, where they told us that we’d have to get the report from the police closest to the crime due to jurisdiction. We sighed, a lot, and I can’t remember what worked, but the nice desk sergeant (I don’t know if that was actually her rank, but that’s what they’re usually called in The Bill) wrote a report while a big group of male prisoners leered and whistled at me through the bars the separating us from them at the back of the station house.

So that was that. We’d also met up with another friend of David’s called Yaw, who is a policeman, and he came along to assist too.

On the last day of the holiday we went our separate ways – Eriye to shop and me to sightsee. I did my usual thing of walking my feet off, but visited a great little museum of West African relics and art and the cultural market.

It was nice to land back in Nigeria, to be back amongst the familiar and the warm smiles that I’m used to, despite the lack of organisation here. Maybe it’s to do with the fact that there’s so many more people, which makes me wonder what form of radical reform from above could possibly focus the burgeoning population.