As the hatter said in her introduction I am a kiwi in Nigeria based out of Melbourne, recovering from living in Vietnam and soon to be working in Nepal. An Ausvietigerianepalkiwi at last count.
However, my time here in Nigeria is drawing to a close.
And, inevitably, I am a bit sad to be leaving already. After all, it's taken me 4-months to work out where the lights for the tennis courts are, what time the bread lady comes with a station-wagon full of croissants to sell outside the clinic on a Saturday and where to buy food that is not 10x the rational price or made out of crude oil byproducts.
My efforts to obtain edible items fulfilling the above criteria had previously not taken me further than the Shell Camp down the road, to the shop in our camp which stocks Italian imported items that must have a discrete Gucci sign on them somewhere to justify their cost, and Park 'n' Shop (locally known as Park 'n' Steal) which sells everything from laptops to 500g bags of cumin seeds but never what you want or need at the time. There are many reasons for the difficulty in grocery shopping here:
a) my on call roster is not conducive to having days off
b) there is never a car/driver/mopol (mobile policeman – big black man with large gun who escorts you when traveling to prevent unnecessary hassles on the street) available when you want one
c) the traffic can reach prohibitive levels stretching the traveling time out to 3-4 hours to go the 12km to town
d) s#$% always happens just as you’re getting ready to go into town.
Somehow though, we managed to pull together all components of a shopping trip last Saturday, and found ourselves being shown around a Utopic warehouse of gargantuan proportions which brought to mind the feeling of a contraband cache of illicit foodstuffs amongst which we, the oyibos (foreigners) would take refuge behind a stack of pure vegetable oil as the authorities confiscated the gingernuts. Sating our starved senses on imported beef, duck, mozzarella and Chilean grapes we then went down town to do a basic shop at Park ‘n’ Shop. Due to the gridlocked and desparate thrusting of cars into an inadequate parking space it is soon to be known as “Not a show in hell of parking ‘n’ it’s daylight robbery what they charge in there”.
Not so the depot for soft drinks and beer located, logically enough, in what, from the outside, appears to be a hospital. Easy parking, cheap Star beer and the reassurance that in case of emergency God Heals.
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