TRAVELS w/P: Tales of Adventure Here & There

Communication Breakdown.

...never mind breakdown. It's broken.

But first, I digress.

Being held captive in a car forces the kinds of conversations that would never slip off Nigerian tongues in regular spaces. That’s one of the pleasures of these painful five and six and seven plus hour overland drives into rural remoteness. The “dancing road” that rattles bones worse than a mogul run might be rough enough to cause a concussion. Yet brain tossed headaches and travel fatigue are worth the best car-ride stories, ever.

 

We pass and talk about a lone elephant tree that haunts locals who fear the deity that resides within. So they toss  eggs at the enormous enigma for protection from its wrath. A strange offering. Many kilometers later our eyes search a clear cut field where two giant sisters once towered. Handfuls of years ago their lumbering magic safeguarded communities from warring. Bitter feuding and bloodshed now cast a grim shadow in their stead.

Conversation shifts to the Efik culture, a tribal tradition unique to Calabar, southern Cross River state and Cuban descendents of the slave trade from these parts, where the Epke Society remains a force of reckoning. Epke is the Efik name for lion. Fierce, feared.

Centuries before colonization, the Society served as government. It continues in this informal but highly regarded capacity today. Sons, and the eldest daughters of sonless families, are initiated into the Society to ward off potential harm and become recognized members of this governing body. Initiated how? Epke in its masquerade form manifests for four days of food and drink, dance and drama. The parents of child initiates keep watch, helplessly wary.

“All the people in the village cook and serve lots of food, most of it meat. And they think nothing of poisoned food.” Poisoned as in food gone bad or intentional? “Enh intentional! They have witchcraft poisons,” colleague and village chief, Double-O explains. “It’s all about power and jealousy. Why should that boy be better than mine?”

If Efik families switch teams from secret society ju-ju-ism to Christianity, they pay protection dash to Epke village stewards when their unknowing sons or eldest daughters go visiting. Fifty naira…a few hundred…may be thousands depending on financial means.

Most Efik villages cascade outward from the heart homestead of Epke, an uninhabited-by-humans building locked, shuttered, foreboding.  

We talk about the Milky Way and the North Star. Colleagues are incredulous that you can actually see these two things.  I relay a favourite memory: lying on the dock with Leah and Kaleigh, falling asleep under the stars –but only after each of us sights a falling star. "Falling star - what is this, now?" How looking up at the galaxy of pinlight or driving through the Rocky Mountains makes one feel so small. “Oh, so Canadian men are small then?” Ummm, No.

We talk about glow worms,Nigeria’s verions of fireflies on the ground, bats the size of crows, my amazing newly-found-thanks-to-Sarah seamstress, Tina Tailor, and Calabarian December Caravan festivities.

We talk about Nigeria’s problems. It’s not corruption that’s the root cause, I’m told. It’s the institutions. It’s the institutions where nepotism favours friends and family, friends of family and family of friends. It’s the institutions where declaring conflict of interest is in the best interest of no one and is therefore never minded. So the wealthy contractor brother-in-law gets the project without following procurement protocol, because the price is right. Right for who?  Or the daughter of a project manager starts up an NGO and is contracted under her new umbrella façade to consult on that same project because no one else is comparably qualified. According to whom?

It’s about underpaid public servants, like police officers, who stop traffic under the pretence of national or state or local road security to collect illegal dash; money to put food on their tables and pay for their children’s school fees. Just a few days ago as we arrive on the outskirts of Abuja, uncertain of our whereabouts, a police roadblock pulls us over and charges that we've run a red. Mr wiry god-complex police officer, AK47 in hand, threatens to impound the truck immediately without release for two weeks. Eventually this same officer hops into the back seat, instructs us to drive up the road a tad and in between berating, suggests a N50,000 fine will make us mobile again. Forty minutes and N4,000 later, we're on our way. 

It’s about Port Authorities not releasing paid for goods because “shipper fees” remain unsettled, though such fees were never part of the equation in the first place.

It’s about asking for blank receipts from the hotel desk person, filling in a fee higher than the amount actually paid and pocketing the difference when travel accounts are reconciled.

It’s about  empowered local government employees hand-picking colleagues who share friendships or blood lines to attend workshops they’re not qualified to attend but are keene to attend to collect per diems.

It’s about people with connections who go temper ranting to the highest placed ears when funding dollars aren’t channelled through their personal accounts and financial reporting strings come attached.

 

It's about bureacrats asking in masked humour: "What of our allowances?" "What provisions have you made for me?" "What is my entitlement?"

 

It’s about subsistence-living security guards siphoning generator gas to fuel their motorbike ride home.

It’s about greed stained into the very soul of Nigerian culture.

What drives that greed?  Certainly a hungry belly.  But more so, it comes from a hunger for stuff.  Status stuff like jeeps and jewellery, trinkets and bobbles and frivolous things that say, look at me I have more than you, I can buy all these things. Look at me, I am a success. I am a big man.

Women are attracted to men who have the power and money to keep them in the stuff that makes them look fine-o, oyibo men especially. Racist thinking equates white skin with wealth.  The other weekend, sitting poolside at Calabar’s most popular hotel with oyibos, I watch two balding and paunchy middle-aged Spaniards cavort with two exquisitely proportioned Nigerian beauties. Neither is a day over 20.  The men flail and splash like pimply teens, animated and lecherous and boning for hormonal release. The young girls play quiet and subservient.  At another table, a group of brash more-than-middle-aged Americans brag long and loud about their rides. Motorbikes are a big thing among expats here. Probably has something to do with the edgy personalities that come this way and stay. Here too, these largely (read: as in large/super-size-me) unattractive men are accompanied by young Nigerian beauties who sit silent and bored, detached from the conversation, patiently waiting for the dutiful sex and money to come.  Communication of the bodies suffices in these cases.

As I write in the feeble morning light of a hotel room without power, today’s first communication glitch presents.  So I turn to this entry’s original topic: communication breakdown.

Example: Yesterday evening I visit the hotel restaurant to ask that a simple omelette and a cup of coffee be delivered to my room by 8:30am.The time of course passes this morning without room service. After sufficient wait an inquiry at reception brings yesterday’s restaurant gent to my room.

"Your omlette, ma' I prepare it now?"
No. It is passed 8:30. It is late-o. You cancel the order, now. You bring tomorrow on time, yes? So you cook tomorrow at 8 o'clock okay?

Example: Seven months into a 12 month placement someone tells me that sitting with legs crossed is a terrible sign of disrespect. The same goes for tucking hands into pockets.  People who know me know I’m a habitual leg crosser; I’ve clearly disrespected many, many folk many, many times.  Too bad this wasn’t communicated at the outset, no?

Example: Every three months volunteers receive a meagre stipend. I am one of the lucky few with a Nigerian bank account. You’d think that would make transactions easier. Not.  A long-standing VSO finance employee, of Nigerian decent, is politely instructed to make the deposit early in the day given that the transaction is happening on a Friday and Fridays are notoriously chaotic.  He makes a cash deposit at 10:00am. Come 3:30pm after standing in an ATM line up for over an hour, I find out a withdrawal isn’t possible. A bank retail marketing officer says there’s no way he can pull up account details on the computer. Becoming Nigerian, the voice rises with curt condescension.  Results start happening. One phone call leads to another. VSO finance guy runs to the bank where he’d made the cash deposit to find out it hasn’t yet been processed. Cash deposits are reconciled at end of day with all other cash transactions, don’t you know. You’d think he’d have clued into this by now. After all he’s been doing this job for what, ten years. And what’s with bank records not being electronically accessible? Where’s e-communication in this story? Turns out they in fact are. Lazy pulled rank.

Example:  Passive-aggressive behaviour makes for an uncomfortable office environment, especially when the target is you.  The principle perpetrator is respected for business savvy and diplomatic acumen.  I discuss the situation with my oga /slash/boss, tons of Nigerians, expats who might as well be Nigerian, and expats who are just as confounded as me. If there’s one thing we all agree on, it’s that if you can survive the Nigerian work place you can excel just about anywhere else in this world.  So, how to deal with the situation?

* Suggest you have inside knowledge and connections to big people without giving anything away.

* Be evasive

* Allude to your respected value outside of the conventional train of command

* Most of all, be tough. Put the perpetrator's sense of status into question. Use tone and ramp up the volume.

So I do exactly as advised and walk away from a confrontational scene – initiated by the perpetrator no less – a satisfied and for now, respected victor.

 

Yet all these ugly underbelly scars mean nothing in the end. Nigeria, as it turns out, is one of the happiest countries on this wee planet we call home. People are always laughing; the kind of big raucous belly laughs you can’t help but laugh along with.  The same goes for song.  People belt out hymns and pop tunes while working at their desks or crammed into a share taxi with five other passengers. Walk anywhere and you’re greeted by more people than you can count. Tell a Nigerian how this never happens back home and their stunned response stuns you into accepting what impersonal and detached peoples we are in the west. While we warn our children to stay away from strangers, the only strangers to Nigerians are foreigners like me and even at that, the “ MissPat! Auntie!” shouts and hugs and shy waves from children and grown folk alike makes everything right with the universe, at the very least for that moment.