Can you believe this crap..?

Katharine Houreld has taken time out from running around with sierra leone's pirates and being arrested in Sudan somewhere to write some really good stuff for Associated Press from Lagos. I recommend this recent one to get you all riled up about the world and make you ask yourself "can you believe the crap that goes on around here?"

Thanks Katherine

NFS Film Night

Went to a short film festival run by the Nigerian Field Society and the Goethe Institute in Lagos. The had some great little films. One in particular which was produced by Communication for Change was about a quite famous artist by the name of Nike Okundaye who has been battling to educate women to give them opportunity to gain their own independent income. She was on hand and answered a few questions. Talk about hard yards, this woman has seen it all, been arrested for it, had her property destroyed / confiscated because of it, you name it. To add to all of that, she - and her students - produce some awesome stuff ( a little too expensive for me, but still good)

All I can say is I am extremely impressed. Best of luck Nike.

Ikaare Unity junior Grammar School

IBSF has been working with The Light Nursery and Primary School, which educates children from Nursery age to Grade 6 along the Ishahayi peninsula. Unfortunately, once the children have finished Primary schooling there are extremely limited opportunities for them to continue their education in such a remote area.

So, we asked around and found a place called the Ikaare Unity Grammar School which is the closest and most appropriate venue for the children to further their education through to JS3 level (year 9 effectively). Over the past 8 months, IBSF has been looking at the viability of this school and creating a rapport with the Principal, teachers and local village elders.

Chief Osaba in the classroom - this place need a lot of work

Anyway, we had a very successful trip to Ishahayi on Thursday, where we dropped off some books and has a look at the new "computer room" where the teachers are all learning to use the computer (we took out a new fan, some speakers and some learning software). I must say it all looks like it's going really well and the guy Lady Salami (the principal)has got teaching them how to use the computer is very good.

Ikaare kids get some new stationary

After that, we dropped in to Ikaare to pay for the labour for the concrete blocks they had been building for stage one of the new building works.

The interesting part of the visit was the appearance of a couple of the local elders, including Joseph who is the "chairman" of the unity junior grammar school (or so he says). Now, I have met all these guys in the past, they generally haven't had anything to do with what we have been discussing with Chief Osaba (the Principal). This day, however, they decided to thank us for all that we had done and promptly took me aside to discuss what was going on with the building, leaving everyone else to sit near the Chiefs' office ( I do apologise to those who were there). I guess it's just the way things are around here that they only seem keen to talk with men...

Anyway, the elders were concerned about the quality of work and the reliability of the local guys. They knew that we had been using another guy called Ben for other works in the past and knew that he did good work and asked if I could get Ben to do the work instead. Chief Osaba, on the other hand, wasn't so thrilled.

It just so happened that Ben was catching a lift back with us to Lagos on our boat so I called him over so we could all talk. I had told him in the past that I didn't really want him to be involved in Ikaare as IBSF agreed that using local people would keep the money in the village and not cause any problems. Now it was the villagers who wanted an outsider to come in... go figure

Now, I must say that the standard of construction of the first building at Ikaare is very poor (and truth be told we will probably be spending money to fix it later this year), and I would certainly be much happier handing large amounts of money to someone we can trust like Ben, but I had a strong feeling that this meant that the whole thing would cost more than originally planned - money we don't have.

Anyway, we arranged for Ben and Chief Osaba to meet on Friday to discuss what needs to be done so that Ben can come up with a quote for next week. I guess I will probably find out the good news then...

Speaking to the Chief alone, he was not over the moon with the idea, as he thought that it might get too expensive and that we might not be able to fund it all and walk away from the whole thing. I told him that we rely on proper written quotations to raise money for projects and that the piecemeal way we were currently doing it would make fund raising harder and the whole thing would probably take longer than if only one person was doing the work. Furthermore, IBSF's funding partners are all aware of Ben's good work and might be more likely to help knowing he's on board (as well as IBSF's own piece of mind). He was also worried that the elders had suggested this idea in the first place so that they might be able to chop some money from Ben while he's doing the work (which they would have not been able to do so easily with Chief Osaba running things). I agree with him on this one, but don't really see any other choice if we want a proper building to be built that will last and be completed in a shorter period of time. It's an unfortunate side to doing business in the country - someone's always trying to chop some money from somewhere

It also seems that the locals of Ikaare are starting to get a little over zealous when it comes to our involvement in the place. Chief Osaba was confronted by a few locals last week after we had dropped off some books (in black plastic bags as per usual) as they though we had brought shoes and indomie noodles and wanted their share! Poor bloke was holed up in his office and couldn't get out untill he showed everyone that his cupboard was full of junior school readers - not 2 minute noodles!!

The collapsed bit on the right is what we're trying to re-build as classrooms

Ikorodu backwaters

We took a trip with the Nigerian Field Society which is a kind of like an anthropological / environmental society that does cultural trips around the place (and lots of bird watching). Anyway, they get people from all over the place (heaps of Germans).

After getting up early on a Sunday (and I mean early - we had to over on the mainland to meet everyone by 8:00) we drove to the back of Ikorodu, which is about an hour out of Lagos proper on the other side of the lagoons, and went down to the local witch doctor's, checking out her wares and learn a little about what a Babalawo (priestess) does. All I can say is that she was selling some interesting sh*t!! It was basically a whole bunch of dead stuff put in old gin bottles with a bit of 100 proof alcohol/petrol added - oh yeah, and she had dead rats on sticks too! I'm not sure if they were special lollies for the kiddies or little warnings to other rats that you place around the house (or both - they did look kinda tasty...) Anyway, at the end of the day I didn't buy anything as I figured that a bottle with a dead snake in it and a bunch of strange looking "herbs" weren't what I needed.

If anyone needs anything, I'm not sure if she has a mail order service but we could probably get a curse put on someone if you need it. We did get a blessing from her, which basically involved banging on an old cow bell, a bit of yelling and then her spitting a mouthful of gin at everyone (I'm sure it was sacred gin). I'm not sure if we were supposed to duck, but everyone probably ended up catching something from her rather than curing anything - anyway, it made the locals laugh. I'm always happy to oblige.

Rats on sticks? No really, Rats on sticks!

lots of interesting stuff to make you feel better

party hats anyone?

After we'd had our weekly dose of dead stuff liqueur, we headed a little further down the road (read: dirt tract through small villages and jungle) to the swamps where we were going to have look at a Palm Wine distillery. And before you get too ahead of yourself, no this wasn't like a large factory filled with stainless steel making fine Scottish whisky, oh no.

Apparently, palm wine stills are generally illegal. Well, not so much illegal as there so much red tape and bribes to get a permit that you're better off having an illegal setup - hence the exotic swamp location, accessible only by canoe.

I must say, the mangrove swamps around here (apart from the obvious stuff like malaria and whatnot) are really beautiful. And this place was far enough from the city that the water was actually clean - not drinkable, but cleaner that normal.

swampy the swamp

canoeing through the mangroves

it was a pretty serious mangrove swamp

(I hear it's a great spot to hide a moonshine operation...)

So after a good quarter of an hour on a very peaceful and scenic Nigerian gondola ride, we arrived at a small village on the shore of the large lagoon between Lagos and Epe where they make wine from raffia palms. Now this isn't the normal way it's done where the sap is tapped into buckets of palms as they grow naturally, this was a little less environmentally friendly.

Basically, these guys don't like climbing (or something) and so they just cur the trees down, make a hole and wait for the sap to run out over a month or so.

mmm tasty looking sap...

sap then gets put in plastic bins for a bit to mature from "bloody awful"

to something similar to brake fluid

Then just to make sure it's strong enough they distill the brake fluid into pretty much pure ethanol. Interestingly, the actual still was a good couple of hundred metres from the village. I'm not sure whether it was to hide it from anyone snooping around, or because the whole thing really looked like an explosive death trap! Seriously, the place basically smelt like high grade rocket fuel - just a sniff was more than enough to finish you off for the weekend...

But we all survived and had a great time and I'm pretty sure we'll all be happy if we don't drink any palm wine for another fifty years.

Ishahayi Beach School

I've been working with the Ishahayi Beach School Foundation out at the small seaside fishing village of Ishahayi (about an hour by boat from Lagos) for over a year now. In that time a new six classroom school building has been completed along with a toilet block (first actual sanitary facilities ever in the village).

More recently I've been spending quite a lot of time out there as IBSF is building a new well and a verandah along the from of the school to protect the kids during the wet season.

I taught the locals how to treat the water in the existing well with chlorine last year, but with the toilet block coming on line (we also pulled out two of the six toilets to make a place for the teachers to have bucket showers) we need a better supply of water - so for just over $1,000 aud you can get your own well around here!

I never like the way they carry out their building here, but there's not much I can do and all the workers are still around... the well, as it was hand dug in sand, was constructed in concrete above ground in stages, while the hole was dug underneath. The rest was up to gravity to sink the concrete lining. By the time we were at the water table (about 5m I was really feeling for the poor bloke at the bottom who'd bee lowered down by a rope. You have to remember that, apart from a couple of small generators owned by the more wealthy families, the village has no power, so there's no other way to get stuff done other than man power. Even the most simple of materials like cement and aggregate for the concrete has t be loaded into boats over on the mainland (closest decent jetty is 1/2 hr) then carried by hand (well, basket on head) to the work site.

Last year we'd had great success when an artist by the name of Eugene from Lagos had come out to tech the kids how to paint. He'd expected them to draw scenes of buses, traffic and markets like all the kids he's taught in Lagos. But most of the kids out here have never been to the city and don't know what a bus is, so they drew what they knew - coconut trees, fish and footballs (it always football!).

Anyway, Eugene couldn't believe it and fell in love with ishahayi village and was keen to come back. We managed to organise it the other day and Naz, Teresa and I headed out...

While she was back home in the States, Teresa had mentioned the school at ishahayi to her dentist who in turn hit up the local toothbrush rep for some freebies. Now that we've successfully got almost all the kids in walking distance of ishahayi (and that can be quite a way) to go to school, we're trying to get health and sanitation as a priority in the village.