No Country for Young Kids

Yep, you heard right.

Nigeria isn’t exactly the most child-friendly place in the world. We drove past a preschool once. Most buildings have walls around their perimeters, this one wasn’t any different. But to make them look more festive, the preschool walls are painted with children things like the alphabet. So we drove past the wall, and I was looking at their rendition of the alphabet. A for apple, C for cow…G for gun. Yeah. Gun. They even had a picture of a handgun under G. If you can believe it this happens a lot. I’ve seen so many G for guns here it’s crazy. I’ve even heard sample sentences in 2^nd grade English books like, “the man stole from the woman and pointed his gun at her.” You might be saying, “but Nigeria even has it’s own version of Sesame Street! Doesn’t that count?” Sorta…nah. Not really. For one, Sesame Street Nigeria is on a channel hiding in a desolate corner of the satellite TV services. It only comes on at awkward times on awkward days. My Mother finally got the time right and my little sister was able to watch an episode. That was the first and last time she’s ever watched Sesame Street Nigeria. Sesame Street Nigeria is just a bunch of clips with Sesame Street America with Nigerian voice overs. It's super, super weird looking. Imagine Ernie speaking pidgin English! On the other hand Nigeria can be extremely children friendly. Here, Children's Day is a national holiday with parties and games at public venues, and every family can join! So Nigeria can be friendly and unfriendly to children.

Signing off,

The Traveller

DEAD ZONE

Error e233: THE REMOTE COMPUTER DID NOT RESPOND

Error e344: SERVER CONNECTION WAS RESET

These are some of the excuses we've been getting for the past month. I'm sorry. I truly am. But hear me out first; I haven't been trying to avoid posting here. Our internet access has been nonexistent for the longest now. Something happened to our network! We haven't been able to load Google, let alone Blogger, for weeks. I've finally got through but I don't know how long it'll last. Someone came over today to help us out. He thought that maybe it was our modem that was malfunctioning. Turns out it's our area. :( There's really nothing we can do about that. You'd think we live in some remote forest in the middle of nowhere! If you can believe it, we don't. We live right next to a big community. But for some reason nothing works here. The worst part is that it doesn't make any sense. Here's why: in Nigeria almost every modem is a mobile one. It's plug and play. And there are different networks that make different modems. We use Multilinks. To put it simply, Multilinks is dead. At least here, anyway. So today we tried another called Glo. Now, Glo is also a phone network. We actually have a Glo phone and we get five bars in certain areas in the house. It's pretty reliable. The same SIM that's in our Glo phone is in a Glo modem. Theoretically you should be accessing the same network. Therefore, if the phone works then we should get decent internet access through Glo. It doesn't work that way. I don't know why. We took our Glo phone. We took our Glo modem. Glo phone: five bars. Glo modem: ... I'm at my wits end here. I don't know what we're supposed to do. The only other option we have is this internet thingy on the university campus up the street. It's called VSAT and the minimum download speeds are like 250 kbps or something like that. Around here that's like legendary speeds. All we have to do is get a dish so we can send the internet data stuff to the house. I really hope we get this worked out!

Signing off,
The Traveler

Babysitting

We're babysitting a friend's dog.

Her name is Bones and they got her really recently. Because she isn't used to them yet she's pretty skittish. But she warmed up to Shep really quick! She gets really happy when she comes over to our house and sees him here. We've been watching her for about a week now since our friends had to go to Lagos. They're back now and they'll be taking Bones back to their house today. I think she's ready to go back to her home. So am I! I have to walk both of the dogs with my Dad and that's some super hard work. They are always pulling us around trying to chase each other and run around. And I thought walking Shep was hard! Speaking of Shep, we've been wondering how we will take him with us back to America. We don't know how hard it'll be. What if the airport security don't let us take him or something like that? We don't know for sure. I've done some research but I'm still a little bit unsure. It's alright though, we'll figure something out! I just wish that we could meet somebody who brought a dog from Nigeria to America. Then they could explain to us what they went through.

Signing off,
The Traveler

Fake Titles!

You heard right!

My parents were talking with some of their friends and hour ago. One of them said that they know some people who'll assign themselves the title "Dr." when they're not really even close to being a doctor! Freaky stuff right? Why lie? Well it's this exotic idea that most of you might not understand...it's called showing off. They wanna be the coolest kids on the block so they make themselves the coolest kids on the block by calling themselves the coolest kids on the block. It's pretty low, like real bad. My Mother got pretty angry when she heard that. She was ranting about how those people don't know how much work it takes to earn the "Dr." title legitimately. I agree. Those sort of people get on my last nerve. They just don't care. So because being called "Dr." is the cool new thing they try to jump the bandwagon in the laziest way possible. Honestly it's too easy to earn a title here in Nigeria. Pretty much anyone can do it. You can even go to illegal places and they'll print out an awesome looking certificate with your signature on it. Don't get me wrong! Not everyone's a crook. A lot of the students and professors earn their titles the correct hard way. I think that most of these students earn even more what with all of the strikes they have to sit through. A four year course could be doubled because of a full university shutdown! But I still thought the fake title stuff was interesting so I just wanted to tell you all. :)

Signing off,
The Traveler

Ew

We were on the OAU campus the other day.

I'm participating in a workshop about National Instruments LabVIEW. It's a graphical proggraming language and environment. For all of you non-geeks out there it means that it computer stuff. Anyway while we were walking to the lesson there was this HORRIBLE smell. It was really really really bad. Super bad. I had no idea where it was coming from. Can you guess what it was? It was sewage. It had rained recently and the rainwater sloshed up all of the sewage below our feet. There are sewage vents throughout the building channeling the stench above ground! EPIC FAIL ARCHITECTS. EPIC. FAIL. Fail to the nth power. Yeah. That bad. The class itself was pretty good though. I'm going again at 2. It's really long, today it's from 2 to about 7! I'll be there for like half of the day, so I better bring my power cord for my laptop. Some of the poor students had nowhere to plug their computers in just like me. Unfortunately for them their laptops' batteries were really weak. They died within the first 20 minutes. :( At least it's getting me closer to my goal. Soon I'll be a coding extraordinaire!

Signing off,
The Traveler

How to Not Look Like a Jerk in Nigeria 2

I said I'd make another one and I wasn't lying. Here we go, we're starting with Rule #6!

Rule #6 - Pure Water is NOT Pure Water!!!

A Nigerian you've been talking with talks about how it's really hot today. You agree, and ask if you could get something to drink. The Nigerian brings back a small plastic sack. Inside is water. Whatever you do DON'T DRINK IT. UNLESS if you're from here! It's very important! This water is called Pure Water and it's anything but pure. The hundreds of companies that make this so called Pure Water suck dirty water out of a borehole and use a rudimentary filtration system. Most of the bacteria stays in there. Every time we've been forced to drink Pure Water since we've been here we've gotten sick. Now the reason I say it's okay for Nigerians to drink is because their bodies are used to it and they won't start puking. My Dad's Nigerian too but he can't drink it because he's lived in America for a while. Besides Pure Water didn't exist in Nigeria back in the 70s and 80s. Seriously this is something you should remember, unless you're planning on staying here for a long while and you're gonna have to drink Pure Water frequently. It's better just to get your body used to it if this is the case.

Rule #7 - Don't Buy Anything

This is a little bit of an exaggeration. What I mean to say is don't buy anything if you don't have a lot of money in your pocket. The thing is this: you're a foreigner. Nigerians can spot foreigners from five hundred miles away with their eyes blindfolded while hanging upside-down in a rapidly flowing river. If you hear somebody shout "oyibo!" at you then you know you've been spotted. Any minute now you're gonna be sniped down by horrible prices. In Nigeria a lot of products don't have any price tags on them. Because of this haggling is the benevolent overlord. People haggle everywhere; sometimes when Nigerians come to America and places like that they even miss it. I personally am not a huge fan of it but it's all about personal preference really. Anyway, because you're a foreigner, if you ask the owner for a shop for an item that should be 100 Naira, the price will skyrocket to 500 Naira. They think you have a lot of money. For example:

YOU: (points at a 50 centiliter bottle of Coke) How much is this?

OWNER: (smiles) 750 Naira!

YOU: (ignorant to the real price so you smile back) Thanks! (you slap the money down and you take your Coke)

NIGERIAN: (turns to owner after staring at this strange foreigner) Hey, my brother! (turns to you) Oyibo!

YOU: (confused so you just nod as you sip your coke)

NIGERIAN: (turns back to owner) Big Coca-Cola.

OWNER: 500 Naira.

YOU: (mouth drops)

You see what I mean? This sort of scene has happened to us a billion times. Of course in this example a 250 Naira price difference isn't much in currencies like the USD or the Euro (do a conversion in Wolfram|Alpha) but it's all about the principle. What if you're buying something much more expensive than a Coke? Like a lawnmower? So you gotta stick up for what you know is the right price!

Rule #8 - There are Code Words...

You go to a restaurant. You ask for the choice of food (nobody has menus). The Nigerian waiter says: "Egba, Amala, Rice." You know that Egba is not a dish, it's what you use to eat soups. You don't wanna eat egba plain so you go for the rice:

YOU: Um...(taps thigh) I guess I'll have rice.

WAITER: (turns away without another word)

After waiting for 300 hours your food arrives. You're surprised; you got a reddish colored rice which is extremely spicy!

YOU: Uh, I asked for rice.

WAITER: Yes.

YOU: (hesitates) You know...just regular rice.

WAITER: (glares) Yes.

YOU: I just wanted white rice.

WAITER: I got you rice! What else do you want me to do, now?!

YOU: (not wanting the waiter to scream again, you ask for some meat) What type of meat do you have?

WAITER: We have Meat.

YOU: Yes...but what types?

WAITER: Meat.

YOU: Yes, but--

WAITER: We have Meat, Meat!

YOU: (breaks down crying)

Guess what? It's not the waiter's fault; it's yours. You don't know the Nigerian code words! So therefore you were confusing yourself and the waiter. The first mistake you made was thinking that "Egba" meant "Egba by itself". "Egba" actually means "Egba with any soup we have ready at the moment." The second mistake you made was that you believed that "rice" meant "white rice". If you say to a Nigerian that you're going to have plain white rice for lunch they'll take you to an asylum. "Rice" has pretty much the same meaning as "Egba" which means that they'll give you whatever rice they have. The third mistake you made was misunderstanding "Meat" to mean "meat". You see where I'm going here? No you don't. "Meat" means "beef". Threw a curveball on that one, didn't I? There are a lot of different code words in Nigeria, I don't know them all and I've been here for two years! You'll learn them the more you talk to people.

Rule #9 - Cellphone Etiquette

When Nigerians talk to other Nigerians on the cellphone (nobody owns traditional phones) they have a unique way of doing it. In the future it might be named the "Are You There?" technique. When Nigerians believe that their phone signal is weak they will scream at the top of their lungs "ARE YOU THERE?!?!" to anybody on the other line. This isn't the peculiar part. What's interesting is that they take the cellphone away from their ear and bring the lower half to their mouth so they can scream with maximum loudness. So it's so ingrained in the culture even when their phone signal is good they scream into the phone and do the mouth tilt thing. So they'll go back and forth; when the person on the other line's talking, they put the cellphone back to their ear, but when it's their turn to talk, they put the phone up to their mouth and start hollering. This is considered the proper thing to do when you think that the phone signal is weak.

Something else that is very important in the Nigerian phone culture is what is called "flashing". Flashing is when you call the person and then hang up in less than a second, not giving the other person anytime to receive the call. Before I explain why they do this (it's not a prank call), let me explain what "credit" is. Credit it what everyone calls the minutes you put on your cell phone. You for example if you put 1,000 Naira credit on your cellphone your account has 1,000 Naira in it. Every minute you spend on the phone might suck like--I don't know--1 Naira? So that's how it works. Now here's why Flashing happens--the person who flashes is tight and they want you to spend your money on the conversation instead of them. Because some people don't want to spend up their credit they flash. You see whoever calls the other is the one who's credit is getting depleted. They started the conversation. So you flash someone else to tell them "hey, call me!". It's kinda selfish but that's how it works! It's also considered rude if you pick up lightning quick when someone's trying to flash. Cellphone culture...fascinating stuff.

Rule #10 - Don't Drive a Rusted Car From 20 Years Ago

If you do the police'll bully you so bad...Every checkpoint you pass they'll bother you asking you for money. All the police really want is money but the thing is that they pick on people who drive broken down cars because they're too afraid to harass the people driving those big bad SUVs. The reason why is because what if the person in that SUV is a governor? And that governor is their half-brother's mother's father's sister's brother's uncle's aunt's friend of a friend's acquaintance? Then because of that the governor will bully their family and their family will bully the police. They don't want that. So drive SUVs! Also it helps to look angry with the window rolled up--that really scares them! >:-D

Thanks for reading these 10 rules. This definitely won't be the end of them! But these ones are just as important as the last ones so READ BOTH.

Signing off,
The Traveler

P.S. It's my sister's birthday today! She's turning 10.

The Internet

Since being here because of us lacking in internet connectivity I have been able to realize how much we depend on the internet.
In America I did not think about internet connections. It was the last thing that I would have ever thought about. But amazingly I was accessing the internet all of the time. The connection part became almost invisible. Now though I notice our internet a lot because it usually doesn't work anyway. We're happy when we get 45 kilobytes per second! For those of you who don't know what that means, it means that Facebook can take ages to load. Fortunately the speeds have been improving over the months yet I still remember when we first came here and we could barely ever access the internet. And now Microsoft has released a public beta for their next version of Windows: Windows 8. I'm using it right now. And now that I'm using the new features I can see that in a few years from now the difference between the internet and real-life will blur until there will be no separation. Almost all of the features in this new Windows uses internet to retrieve information. Even the replacer of Windows Media Player, the Music App, uses the internet so you can buy songs right in your music library! What next?! And what's next for countries like Nigeria where getting access to a high speed internet connection is a very hard feat? Will they be left in the dust, not able to access information as quickly and easily as the rest of the world? Hopefully the internet connection will keep on getting faster or else...it won't be good.

Signing off,
The Traveler