We have now reached the point in our big adventure where it becomes time for the whine blog. Those of you who wish to maintain the illusion that we are living in a tropical paradise are encourage to re-read previous entries or check back later in the week.

Whine number 1. Living on the compound is constant noise. Last night our Islamic neighbors were using the powers of a 15 million gigiwatt PA system to pray at 7 pm, 10 pm, 12:30 am, 3:30 am and 5:30 am. It is like living next door to the world’s largest alarm clock with a defective snooze button. What I really want to know is who wakes up at 3:30 in the morning and then prays for 40 minutes? I also want to know how come their generator is better than ours, because they always have power! For no apparent reason, the fire alarm in the flats has started going off, and then it will stop, then it will start and this went on for 15 minutes on Wednesday night. The air conditioner in our bedroom senses the break between prayers and emits a high pitch whine. The back of our flat overlooks the soccer field, which means that on Saturday morning the joyous shouts of kindergarten soccer players will wake us up. That fits in well with the joyous shouts of marines stationed at the consulate that wake us up occasionally during the week. We also have the beeping that accompanies the regular power outages and roar of the generators that follows the power outages. We have a large beautiful tree right outside or window that hosts a very loud squawking bird on most mornings. It is a nice accompaniment to the barking dog. An early morning serenade that usually is played well before the alarm clock.

I am sure that eventually all of these things will become background noise, but now they are loud and annoying. We have been here seven weeks and I can count the full nights of sleep on one hand.

Whine number 2. “Oh this is really unusual, the rainy season always ends the first week in September.” It is now well past the middle of October and we are still having the rainy season. This is not gray misting rain. It is cow peeing on a flat rock rain. It is seep through the walls and windows and make puddles on the flat floor rain. This is a walk 15 yards to my classroom and be dripping wet rain. Sure it is warm, bordering on hot, but it is still gray, overcast, no sun kind of rainy weather. If I stand in front of the AC and just look out the window I can see February in Tacoma. Part of the appeal, at least for me, was the chance of regular exposure to sunshine and I’m not getting it. We didn’t pack raincoats or umbrellas. Why would you need things like that when you are living south of the Sahara Desert? So enough of the rain, bring on the tropics, and the sweltering heat and the blistering sun. I want movie Africa!

Whine number 3. How hard is it to create a mail system in a country? Give people an address, take some of your oil money and buy some trucks, put your own picture on the stamp and make it possible to mail something! With NO mail system we have to drive around and find a guy to buy minutes for the cell phone; we buy minutes for the TV cable. Smart cards all over the place but you can’t mail a letter or package home? The Slater’s steward showed up at their flat on weekend because he needed help. His son is in boarding school in Ghana and had run out of food money. The dorm mother drove from Ghana to Lagos to help him out. No phone because if you don’t have a mail system you can’t bill for service, no mail system so you can’t send a letter. The only choice was to drive. Things would be so much easier if you could have a bill arrive at your home. Did you ever imagine someone would say that?

Strange but True

Despite living in Africa the kids have had 2 out of 4 soccer games rained out.

The checkout counters at grocery stores in Lagos have cash drawers large enough to serve as sock drawers and a bill counter. When items have price tags in the ten thousands, but the most common denomination is a 500 note, the bill counter comes in handy.

In Go-slows you can by glass bottles filled with peanuts, and plastic bags filled with water.

A family of four, with four keys to their apartment, can lock themselves out of said apartment on a Friday afternoon.

Even though a family of four lives less that 100 yards from their work and school, they will frequently have to sprint out of their home to avoid being late to work.

A one hour tennis lesson can leave a person gasping for air, with legs so wobbly he or she can barely walk up three flights of stairs.

Provided with the motivation of a dinner out, 6 full sized adults can fit inside a Toyota Corolla.


You can always find players for wiffelball on the beach.

It is possible to give a homework assginment every day and have every student turn in the homework assignment.

In even a highly motivated group of high school students, there is at least one person who can not put his or her name on an assignment.

In Africa your glasses or camera lens will fog up when you walk OUTSIDE.

You can experience total darkness when the power goes of at 5 in the morning and you are in the shower.

The best place to store Lucky Charms, sugar, flour, and other ant friendly foods is in the freezer.

The roar of a generator starting up can be a very reassuring thing.

If a cockroach does not want to be flushed down the toliet, it can not be flushed down the toliet. Even if it has died.


Bryan Slater may be an awebo, but he barters like an Igbo.

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.