Living dangerously

Finally, I am sitting here typing in my first locally sown dress: having difficulty to breathe, while displaying unhealthy amounts of breast – in short my idea to get a Nigerian tailor to make a western-style dress of my own design has failed. The tailor, Bayo, a young man who was recommended by a friend from Akwanga, stormed into my life and disappeared without a trace just as quickly. He came to Lagos to work for a lady here and I was to be one of his first clients. He called me as soon as he arrived to town and I invited him to the office to discuss the makings of my dress. On his second visit he took my measurements and a week later, when he was supposed to come with the finished goods, having failed to show up for our arranged appointment, decided to come a day after without calling, at which time I was in Ikoyi. Finally we fixed another date for him to deliver my dress and it just so happened I needed to go to a meeting out of the office so when he arrived I was not there. By the time I got back in the late afternoon, having expected him to have left, I found out that he had become urgently ill, puking all over our reception area and had to be rushed to a clinic. He got the usual treatment: pills of different colours in little plastic bags, that noone knew what they were, probably an injection or two, no diagnosis and a large bill to pay. He had no money so our admin officer lent the cash from our pettycash and I decided he should stay in our spare room in the boys’ quarters for the night as he still had fever. He then told me the story of having had to walk everywhere for the past week as his job at this lady’s workshop didn’t materialize and he’d had no money even for public transport. He had showed up at his prospective employer’s place and found out she had been shot. I know it sounds like an unbelievable story but I think people here do live from hand to mouth and there are absolutely no safety nets so when disaster strikes, it strikes hard. The next day, he looked better, I tried the dress on and it was too big so we decided he was going to adjust it. He was so grateful for us at the office taking care of him, he said he would make me a few adire attires as a gift. I told him he could just sow some more stuff for me and I would cover his hospital bill. After this he went off and I texted him a week later without getting a response. Then his brother showed up with my dress and said Bayo had left for Abuja and was still ill. So this is the story of my too tight dress.

Speaking of hospital visits – Temi, Bisola and I went to the Lekki forest reserve on my initiative, as a different thing to do on the weekend. It was wonderful to be walking in the rainforest on a wooden walkway, with monkeys overhead and peace… most importantly peace and quiet, the biggest scarcity in this town. Unfortunately, the bliss ended with Temi treading on a rotten plank and badly hurting her leg. She was bleeding and we took her to the entrance, where the attendant had conveniently disappeared and the gateman proved utterly useless. Of course there was no first aid kit, off course he wanted to wash the wound with contaminated water and of course there was no possibility to get a refund. So our adventure ended up in a clinic with Temi promising to write an article in the new edition of ‘Whatsnew?’ (Lagos’ equivalent of Time Out that her brother runs) about the appaling state of the forest reserve. The response we got from many when telling the story was ‘What did you go and do in that forest in the first place?’ I am noticing a lot of people don’t explore at all and are perfectly happy doing the same things over and over again. When I ask people (and I mean young, educated, well-off) about what they get up to in the weekends, they answer ‘go out on Friday, go clubbing on the Island on Saturday’, not even thinking that I may be asking what they do during the day. The answer is nothing special. No wonder the National Theatre is just an empty relic, and the only cinemas in this country are in Lagos (there are none in Abuja!) people just don’t crave cultural stimuli. They go to church, visit friends, go to engagements and weddings and watch TV. I suppose I should modify this statement – the culture here is all of the above and just very different from what I associate with culture.

Recently I arranged a recruitment day at the office because we are sourcing for a new finance officer and all the CVs had under hobby: meeting people and watching TV… or occasionally reading, but when prompted people could not really answer the last book they had read, so I think it was just put in to be original. Shopping at an air-conditioned mall is another favorite pastime and one I have started enjoying as well. Today I went to Citymall for lunch with Yemisi, my favorite so far, it has a coffeshop where you can get panini and lattes (unfortunately not with soft foam, but I don’t want to push my luck anyway) and then we looked at some bling (tacky whitegold and precious stone jewelry ) at the jewelry store run by a friend of hers, who turns out to be the brother of one of Temi’s friends who used to be married to the wife of another friend of Temi’s, who I also know… This is not an unusual setup, I am only now beginning to realize how small Lagos is, even though big, and everyone knows everything about everyone else… even I can start making the connections after a few months here.

Workwise I have been absolutely swamped, as Yemisi was away for 3 weeks and Bolaji, the other senior person in the office was off sick with typhoid and malaria. So I was having to deal with everything from writing proposals, managing our financials, running two projects, overseeing the electrician’s or generator repair man’s work, to consulting with the architect on how to best fortify our compound. The reason for this is that we were robbed in broad daylight by two men dressed up as carpenters last week. They eventually managed to walk off with 2 laptops and a mobile phone even though we have a security guard standing by our gate. I always knew these security guys were just for show but this really demonstrated it. So as a consequence the executive director put me in beautiful hotel for 5 nights and did a security overhaul, resulting in stringent procedures and the poor guard who let the carpenters walk off with our stuff is now querying staff as they enter the compound about what they have in their bags. We also employed a malam, however that’s spelled, basically a guy from up north, who is supposed to be patrolling our premises. In the general confusion of the last days, they forgot to introduce him to me and one eve I just saw a guy in shorts walking around the compound. I can’t say it made me feel more safe. There is another guy who sleeps in the spare room (Bayo’s sick room) for now so the place is crawling with new faces and I get phonecalls at 5am about what to do with the key to the spare room or whether I have an umbrella… So I certainly don’t feel alone anymore.

Lagos can be an unsafe place but if you give in to that notion you end up never leaving your compound. Last weekend we didn’t managed to go out in VI because the guys we were with did not feel at ease with driving across the Third Mainland bridge at night, having heard of too many incidents of people (of fair skin colour) getting shot, robbed and kidnapped of late. Ironically enough, later that night Yousef (Syrian friend) got a phonecall that armed robbers were in his street in Ikeja. And I gotta admit staying in the nice hotel in Ikoyi was lovely. I felt much more unrestricted there, I could get on an okada and be at Temi’s in 5 minutes, we could spontaneously go to the cinema on a weeknight or have a drink… the island is much more geared towards the lifestyle I am used to than the mainland, but I guess I can console myself that I am keeping it real and I am tougher than all these ‘ajebottas’ (Yoruba for people born with a silverspoon in their mouth).