a quick note

I realize I have not updated in a while. I think the longer I wait the more I have to share and when I finally feel committed to writing something (and coincidentally the internet is available) I get overwhelmed with all my thoughts, experiences, and observations and have nothing less than something that looks like a novel sized hot mess of field notes.

So, instead of insulting you with that, I’ll just say I had an amazing day yesterday traveling to Jigawa state for CITAD’s “Rural Road Show” where we met with the local government and community members of Auyo. The purpose of these visits are to “plant the computer seed” and to present the technology and some of its uses, sometimes to people who have never seen a computer before. The presentation and most of the communication that day was in Hausa, so I had to learn to take comfort in being the awkward foreigner who doesn’t understand anything that’s going on.

The drive there and back was perfect (besides the usual crazy driving) and like my last visit to a village my first week here, it’s really refreshing to take a break from the busy and polluted streets of Kano to see a bright green countryside with its clay colored dirt, and boabob trees everywhere.

I can’t believe I’m already at the half-way point (and then some). I’m constantly excited and motivated by the projects I have going on here, but definitely worried that I won’t be able to get as much done as I’d like before September 15.

I’m not a haggler

Last night was going to be Adam’s final dinner at Spice Foods restaurant before he leaves the country tomorrow night. It’s our favorite place here and we’ve become friends with the owner. It’s just a quick drive down the street but since its always dark when we are ready to head out for dinner, we’ve taken achabas (motorcycle taxis) to get there and back to the hotel. Instead we got there only to find out that there was a private party, just like last Sunday when we tried to come for the buffet. We went to a Chinese Restaurant a couple blocks away that wasn’t nearly as good (and as far as we know didn’t serve beer).

I thought the hardest part about getting on the achabas would be the insane roads and driving practices, but really my biggest fear at the moment is just dealing with the drivers. All the drivers waiting outside of the hotel know that whoever comes out of it can afford more than the 50 or so naira fare that most people pay. And, according to the culture here just about everything must be haggled.

Common sense tells me that before I get on a bike I should be sure that the driver knows where I want to go and how much I’m going to pay him when I get there. This should be easy but it definitely isn’t. For one, I can barely understand their English and they can barely understand mine. The incredibly huge generator building next to us doesn’t make it easier for anyone to hear. Secondly, it’s in the best interest for the drivers to get you on the bike as quick as possible without ever really settling on anything. They know you have money and once you get there, they can charge whatever they want. So it’s always a struggle/argument with a lot of confusion and hussle. I usually end up paying more than I say I will, sometimes because they end up asking for more or because I just want to please them.

Why is that? At the airport when I first arrived, I was so determined to please the workers there that I didn’t even think to try and put my foot down and remind them that I had already been approved to stay until September, and no, I don’t want to have to go to an immigration office to extend my visa. Instead, I nodded and reassured them that everything is fine. I think my fear is somewhat grounded in reality, after all I am in a strange place that I don’t know well and especially when confronted with figures of authority (official or otherwise) I’m sort of at their whim. At the same time, I can’t set myself up to be taken advantage of because I’m more or less certain that I will be.

Anyway, the big move today! I’m excited.

apparently i have a lot to write about

Pigeon eating and a pending cross-country adventure

Last night Adam and I went to dinner with YZ and CITAD board member Dalah. We went to a place called Kano Club, which is a large membership-based center with a sports complex, restaurant and bar. We sat outside drinking beer and eating roasted pigeon with our bare hands. It was pretty amazing. So were the incredible amount of kittens who were running around everywhere and eventually swarmed around our table when they realized we had food. We chucked the left-over bones to them, and it was pretty amusing to see a swarm of cats jump on them wherever I threw it. I think it’s the second highest amount of cats I’ve seen in one place, the first being this bizarre little shed that my friend in San Diego took me to where there had to have been at least 30 cats.

But I digress. Dalah was really friendly and fun to hang out with and invited me to come along with him to Lagos if he goes within the next couple of weeks. I drunkenly excepted the offer, but, I would definitely consider it. There is no way I could go there without being guided by someone who knows their way so this would definitely be a good opportunity to go and stay relatively safe. I’m very eager to see the rest of the country and already may have places to stay and people to show me around in Jos and Abuja (I totally missed Usher, Rhianna, and Mary J Blige there last night, hah). I also NEED to go to Yankari National Park and would love to visit Calabar where there is a Drill Monkey sanctuary! I’m hoping to go on cross country trip in September, that would give me time to plan things out and be a bit more comfortable being in Nigeria.

Internship things

Today I did my first training (that I led by myself). It was on the CMS/blogging tool WordPress, which I use to make this site although my training was focused on using the software for your own domain, rather than the free hosting version that WordPress.com offers. It was a difficult start with the slow internet connection in the office and a lot of confusion on very basic tasks like creating a log-in name and checking e-mail to confirm registration. I forget that simple things that I’ve become really accustomed to from using the internet are pretty new for CITAD, even if their profession is IT. But by the end everyone seemed very interested and were playing around with it a lot. You can see what they made at wordpress.citad.org. They just made silly entries as examples but you can get a feel for what they were doing and what they learned.

I’m very excited/nervous about my move on Monday. I’ll be staying at Mambayya House, also known as the Centre for Democratic Research and Training. I met with the director, Dr. Haruna Wakili on Thursday and was taken on a tour of the facilities.

I didn’t know what to expect before I got there, but I was pleasantly surprised to find out how quiet and clean the place is, in addition to learning about all the amazing work they are doing there. Their purpose to be a bridge between the ivory tower of Bayero University and the rest of the town. To meet that goal, they hold workshops and trainings to increase the political awareness and tools of citizens. Right now they are trying to collect information related to elections by asking questions like: what is the experience of voters at polling places, what are the issues that citizens vote on, where do political parties get their campaign money from, etc. Adam does a lot of work with voter engagement in the US and it was really interesting to hear him and Dr. Wakili relate their experiences and overall strategies, despite the obvious differences between politics in the US and Nigeria. Some issues, like engaging voters and increasing their political power, are true to democracies everywhere.

Anyway, Mambayya House is where Mallam Aminu Kano used to live. His house is now a museum and his burial site. The compound also has a library, restaurant, conference hall, and guest apartments in addition to a large administrative building. It’s all very green and open, not to mention quiet which will be a really amazing break from Tahir’s Guest Palace which seems to have a billion people running around it at all times of the day. I’ll be working with a couple of people there as well as someone from Bayero University to teach them how to create functional and easy to update websites (probably with WordPress, also).

The first time I drove past Mambayya I was coming from a different direction than yesterday and I think it was considerably more crowded and “crazy”. Coming from a different direction on Thursday I saw that Mambayya is near really big markets, some that looked more modern and others very, very old. From the car everything seemed so alive and vibrant, and I would imagine it wouldn’t be too difficult to navigate the area by myself. We’ll see.

There is a lot to do this summer, and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to accomplish everything I would like to in a couple of months, but, I’ll give it a shot. I’m hoping to have more of a concrete action plan in the next few days.

CITAD

I posted this on the official GIIP blog. It’s probably the most coherent (although that’s not saying much) thing I’ve written since coming here:

Today was our fourth day of website design training with the staff of CITAD, the Centre for Information Technology and Development. It started last Thursday with a not so shocking but certainly annoying occurrence: the diesel generator that powers the office blew out and set on fire. This meant that nearly half of our planned three-hour training had to be run entirely without electricity until a new generator arrived the next day.

This is Kano. With no real infrastructure, every individual home and business is responsible for their own electricity, spending astronomical amounts of money on diesel and generator repairs for what is an entirely unpredictable power supply. Combine this with the open sewers and poverty of the old Kano city viewable from their second story balcony, the CITAD offices might seem at first glance an unlikely place for web design trainings.

But at the end of four days the staff had put together impressive and functional sites made entirely with HTML and CSS. A feat, I reminded our fearless leader Adam Thompson, took weeks for UCSC students to master in our GIIP lab course. Their enthusiasm and thirst for IT knowledge was incredibly motivating.

The amount of work that CITAD is able to accomplish in the community awe-inspiring. A large computer lab (although only qualifiable as such by Western standards by the sheer amount of monitors in one room) hosts software trainings and exams day in and day out. Outside of the office, the staff makes visits at schools, villages, and mosques, informing individuals and organizations about the importance of computer technology in the economic and political development of their local and national communities. On a wider scale, they observe elections and advocate for better governance and public participation in politics. Their gender officer, Fatima Ibrahim, focuses her efforts on the implications of ICT for women. To accomplish this all in such challenging conditions for over a decade is a testament to their commitment and strength as an organization.

The web design trainings will be followed this week by classes on office networking, managing excel databases, content management systems, and more. All of this with the intention of CITAD staff repeating the trainings with other civil society organizations in Kano. On Monday, Adam Thompson will return to the states and I will continue working with CITAD to increase their skills and capacity to include ICT in their work. I’m convinced that we learned just as much about teaching technology in Kano as the CITAD staff learned HTML and CSS. There is no doubt that the challenges of these trainings, not limited to just power and language barriers, will continue throughout the summer but I’m confident of the lasting impact this technology can bring to their work and the importance of GIIP’s partnership with organizations like CITAD.

-Scott Reed

pictures, finally

My internet is fast (for now) and I can finally upload some pictures! They are all at this link: http://picasaweb.google.com/ScottBrReed. Many of them were taken by Eugene, you can see his flickr page at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eekim/

I wish I could write the story behind each picture…but, that would take forever. Hopefully I can be better about uploading pictures a little bit at a time.

things

Maira had the great idea of writing down things that she is and isn’t getting used to in Malaysia (you can read her blog at newsfrompj.blogspot.com) so I think I’ll try a list of my own….

Things I am getting used to:

-The loud prayer at 4:30am
-Trash everywhere
-The overwhelming amount of men who work at the hotel, and everywhere for that matter. There really is a surplus of labor.
-Open sewers
-Not understanding what most people are saying
-The crazy streets
-Watching Al Jazeera English! It’s seriously the best news channel I have ever watched.
-Seeing people with polio.

Not getting used to:

-Secret service and being afraid of the police.
-Not remembering everyone’s long, complicated names.
-Feeling like people think Adam and I can solve all their tech problems, or that we are more important than we actually are.
-Sweating all the time, everywhere.
-The ridiculous amount of service we receive at this hotel
-Walking places
-A man’s world/man talk…I need to get used to communicating and engaging with mostly men.

treats

Last night I had goat’s head soup.

Everyone has their “school” where they go for what, in their opinion, is the best version in town. Yahiya and Judith took a couple of us to a part of town we hadn’t been to in the past week, and one that I never would have expected to exist. Because Kano is predominantly Muslim and under Sharia law, alcohol is either not available or illegally sold, usually in restaurants and hotels. Judith told us of a time when a previous governor walked into a hotel with a group of thugs and smashed all the beer bottles they had.

Most if not all the restaurants we’ve visited in the past week have been in the hotel district and serve beer, and most were more or less what you would expect of a restaurant anywhere (except one Chinese place served Cow Penis Soup, not really sure how that is possible or what it really is, but there you have it).

But last night we ended up in an area that has an unspoken rule of freedom to consume alcohol and have a good time. Beer gardens lined the streets and people, cars, and bikes were everywhere. This area brings in a lot of money and its off limits to police intervention. We sat around a small outdoor table with crowd of other groups around us transfixed on the final EuroCup game playing on a few small, old TVs. We ordered our beers (Gulder is Nigerian) and waited for our meals. Behind us a women smashed the cooked goat heads into small pieces before they were spiced and and made into a stew like dish. Apparently she is there every night, and her skill and smashing makes this “school” the best.

Luckily, it was dark out with little lights around us, so I couldn’t exactly see what was in front of me, but an entire (small) head was there every part, in little pieces mixed up in a spicy sauce. Of course you eat it all with your hands. So, I picked it up part by part, unaware of what it was exactly (but you could sort of guess by how chewy and how much cartilage was in each bite).

….I liked it! The taste wasn’t outrageously different than anything I’ve had before, and I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of an intelligible animal head that was sitting in front of me. YZ apparently has his own school, so I’ll definitely ask him to take me so I can compare and choose my own “place”.  It was really the entire experience that made it enjoyable, though. Everything is so ironic and contradictory here. There is so much rules and religion, but at the same time, so much chaos and freedom. I feel lucky that I have local connections here that can show me places that I doubt many tourists visit, not that Kano is much of tourist destination.

Until next time….