Ah-ah, sorry-oh…

…for the big gap between posts. Time really is flying by and – amazingly(!) – I’m getting by with checking emails and the like only every couple of days. There is an internet connection in the office I’m using as a base during the day but it’s painfully slow so I usually head out to a nearby internet café (of which there are heaps to chose from). The one I usually use has a number of posters up warning scammers not to ‘do 419’ and that all emails can be traced – if only it were true! Internet fraud must be up there with oil as one of Nigeria’s key earners these days.

419s aside, everything is going well here in Port Harcourt. I’m staying with Chris and Faith in the Mguoba area of town, which is about a 25 minute bike ride from the office, and I’m settling in nicely. Work-wise, I’ve been focusing on catching up with old contacts and colleagues and getting up to speed with goings on in the Niger Delta. From next week, I’ll be concentrating more on making arrangements for the rest of my fieldwork – identifying a suitable community, negotiating access, sorting out accommodation and so on.

Hmmm, what other news? I had a great weekend with my friends/sort-of colleagues, Damka and Jo. On Saturday, the 3 of us went swimming at a hotel in town and had a really good meal (mmmm, pizza!) and then went to watch the football at the Port Harcourt Polo Club (a grand name for a not very grand – yet strictly members only – place), courtesy of the friend of an American PhD student Damka knows. After the football, we were invited to her friend’s brother’s place to continue the evening where we ended up doing karaoke until the early hours. Another weird night in Africa! Sunday got off to a very slow start as a result (no surprises there), which was fine with me. At lunchtime Jo and I headed to the local market to get some food and caused much amusement… One ‘oyibo’ [white person] causes enough of a stir but two, well, that’s just entertainment. Jo’s been here a number of times and the neighbourhood kids know his name so we were followed by a chorus of ‘oyibo-Jo-oyibo-Jo’! The market’s really ramshackle – lots of rough wooden shacks roughly piled in together and stacked high with tomatoes, chillies, dried fish, bitter leaf (like spinach), plantains, stock cubes, palm oil and the occasional pile of fly-specked meat or stacks of green oranges. Jo went off to investigate the meat situation while I bantered with one of the tomato ladies. She assumed he was my husband and I put her straight saying that he wasn’t nearly strong enough to marry me (much mirth ensued). Oh, she said, so he’s your brother? I couldn’t be arsed to explain that he was a sort-of-colleague so I just agreed (been doing a lot of that of late!). After lunch and some more lying around we headed off to meet Damka at a bar to watch the football final. We were joined by a couple of other oyibos that Jo knows – who are working for the Small Arms Survey (SAS – how’s that for an unfortunate acronym?) and were just in town for a couple of days. After the football, Jo wanted to take the SAS guys to one of the bars where oil workers go – to show them the seedier side of Port Harcourt. These places are horrendous – loads of really stunning Nigerian girls being pawed by fat, middle-aged expats – but all too common in oil country. Our arrival caused quite a stir (one oyibo girl and three blokes in the their 20s – not quite the usual clientele). As long as I was around the guys were okay but as soon as I went off to the toilet or bar they were deluged. The girls were particularly taken with Jo (despite his protestations that he worked for an NGO, not an oil company) and made me promise to bring him back some time soon… This weekend I hope to go to Bori, the ‘capital’ of Ogoni, to catch up with my old colleagues at FOWA (Federation of Ogoni Women’s Associations) and attend the christening of a friend’s baby – will keep you posted!