Rainbolt Travel Diary

Gin and tonics and Snickerdoodles. An interesting combination, but they work together. The gin is easy to find here; it’s in most grocery stores, shopping malls, and at the local market. Tonic is available at the “mineral fill up” where the first case of 24 you buy will cost you 9 dollars. After that, you just take back the case of empties; they will “fill up” for about 6 dollars. Snickerdoodles take a little more work, but not really. Juliette makes them twice a week. They go in the kid’s lunch, they are after school snacks, and Jesse next door manages to eat more than his fair share of them. So here I am thinking about all that is going on around me with a gin and tonic and a napkin full of Snickerdoodles.

It fits. Things that shouldn’t go together do go together here. You shouldn’t have people living on street corners gathered around an old can made into an oil lamp, when just on the other side of a 10 foot stone wall with concertina wire, people are getting private tennis lessons and massages, but you do. You shouldn’t have people driving around in brand new Land Rovers while 20 people are crammed into a dilapidated Volkswagen van, but you do. The extremes here jump out everywhere. The rich are rich. They have generators, and air conditioning, and restaurants, and boats, and huts on the beach. The poor have nothing. They cook over an open fire in the bottom of a burned out barrel. They sleep under a sheets of tin leaned against the walls of a compound. In the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma there is an exhibit of a shack from the Hooverville outside of Seattle. For many of the people I see here that would be luxury accommodations. Gin and Tonic and Snickerdoodles.
We have a phone, but we are still not sure which combination of numbers we should use to get a hold of somebody who lives off the compound. We have cable, but it took three people, 6 calls to the company, four resets and two days to get it to work. We watched football Sunday, but we had to drive 10 minutes and make 4 trips to get us all there. There is a bank every 25 yards, but we call a guy and he shows up with a plastic bag filled with Naira to change money. We see a man in a uniform and we all lock our car doors and hope he doesn’t stop us. Gin and Tonic and Snickerdoodles.

We spent a day at the beach for Nigerian Independence Day. We rented a beach hut with a palm frond roof and a bamboo fence. We ate BBQ, drank beer, swam in the ocean and built sand castles. The kids played soccer, wiffleball, and football. Any place else in the world this would have set us back hundreds of dollars. Our share of the rental fee was just under 4 dollars. The drawback was that we spent the day under the watchful eye of at least 15 kids under 10 waiting to see what kind of leftovers we would hand them. Even before we set down our coolers down vendors selling fake designer watches, sunglasses, batik tablecloths, woodcarvings, beads, and woodcarvings surrounded us. Gin and Tonic and Snickerdoodles.
This is a country of extremes, but it works. Right next door to AIS is a Muslim school, we get along. Right across the street is a mosque and next-door is a church, they get along. Although I do think they have a small battle going on to see who has the loudest PA system. When people knock on the car window for a handout they smile and wave goodbye when you leave without giving them anything. Eight cars will approach a round about at 8 different speeds with 8 different horns blaring going towards 8 different destinations and they all get to where they are going. It all seems to work in a crazy twisted sort of way. Gin and Tonic and Snickerdoodles.