Roots

I told Alex and Freya on Monday evening that we were heading to the UK – the first time we’ve been back since arriving here at the end of January and both were incredibly excited. On Tuesday morning, I found their little suitcases had been packed and were waiting outside their bedroom door. I haven’t yet inspected the contents, but Alex informs me that his contains ‘cars, ribbons, a purse with some money in it and some clothes’. Freya is making do with ‘dresses and some big girls pants’. I may do a little surreptitious re-packing before we depart.
I'm actually feeling quite reluctant to leave Abuja, even temporarily.

This past 3 weeks has been fantastic for me. In some ways this is rather odd - when we returned from Ghana I was feeling incredibly apprehensive about being back in Abuja in the wake of the Nyanya bombings. There has been more awful violence – with recent bombings in Kano and Jos being a very worrying development. Incidents like this are obviously unsettling, and there have been several moments over the past month, since the first Nyanya bombing, when I have seriously thought that I'd like to pack my bags and return home for good. But, bizarrely, over this past week I have felt more and more certain that being here is the right thing to do. It has probably helped that I've been frantically busy organising a training workshop for the research project I'm working on at the British Council, but the more time I spend here the more I feel grounded I feel. I absolutely love my colleagues - it feels similar in that respect to working in the British Council office in Tehran, where I made some wonderful Iranian friends - and I feel I am learning as much about Nigeria by simply sitting at a desk listening to office banter (which is on another scale here; a full-on shouting match over the correct way to file an invoice is instantly forgotten when someone cracks a joke two minutes later) as I do by reading the newspapers or listening to the radio. I was also recently reminded by a friend that we are all here in Abuja for a reason and that it is important to try to put down roots and embrace the opportunities that are offered here, however long or short our stay in Nigeria might be. This really resonated with me: the opportunity to undertake research here in Nigeria is rare and I’m also incredibly lucky to be working with some remarkable people at a publishing company here as part of my PhD research, which is an opportunity I couldn’t possibly hope for if we were based in the UK. So I'm now very conscious of not wanting to wish my time here away.


In the past couple of weeks I’ve come to accept that Nigeria is a strange and fascinating place and, although life here can be frustrating and depressing at times, it is also quirky and funny and energizing. I can’t think of many other countries in which a trip to the Federal Inland Revenue Service office could be so entertaining and exasperating in equal measure. I made the trip downtown to the FIRS office today and did eventually obtain the Tax Identification Number I required, but only after a thirty minute wait (because the member of staff I needed to talk to couldn’t be located) and a prolonged, but good-humoured, discussion with several members of staff about why I wasn’t prepared to persuade any of my British friends to come over to Nigeria to become second wives. As I left, brandishing my TIN, I was – somewhat predictably - asked by the security guard at reception if I had anything for her. I offered her a smile and my best wishes for a happy afternoon, which she seemed to find hilarious. And as we drove back, we passed the ‘Bring Back Our Girls’ demonstration at the Unity Foundation, where activists continue to protest every day at 3pm, a sombre reminder of the hopelessness of the situation in Borno state. And then I asked my driver, who I knew came from Jos, if any of his relatives had been affected by the bomb yesterday. Very sadly, he related that his aunt, a widow, who works in the laundry at the Jos University teaching hospital, has been caught up in the blast. She has had one leg amputated, her left hand is badly damaged and her other leg requires serious attention. What a crazy, mixed-up, fascinating and unfathomable place this is. 
But it's 10.30pm and we're being picked up at 5am tomorrow to catch our flight.

So I’d better stop musing on the paradoxical and enigmatic nature of life in Nigeria and go and check what Alex and Freya have actually put in those suitcases of theirs…


More in a month.