christmas memories

At Christmas I no more desire a rose,
Than wish a snow in May's new-fangled shows;
But like of each thing that in season grows.
--William Shakespeare

christmas in nigeria was a bit different then the christmas i've been spending in poland during the last four years. first of all we don't have snow, we don't have real christmas tree's, it doesn't get dark at 16h like it does here in poland, and it's not possible to buy somebody a great christmas present cause the shops in my part of nigeria are not equipt with the kind of things you'd give someone as a present. you'd always have to plan 6 months ahead with the presents and manage to buy then and hide them without anyone noticing. i beleived in santa clause for a long time thanks to my parents, who managed to make him so real. i remember two times that were special.you have to understand that in our house we got our presents on the 24th after dinner. one christmas i was waiting impatiently for the presents to come. we just finished dinner and i was determined to meet santa. i wouldn't leave the living room for a second. so my mom had a great idea.she brought my school books out and told me that i should show santa what i had done this year. i loved it. and just to make sure i wouldn't forget about anything too important i started looking through the notebooks with my mom. we were chatting away when suddenly i lifted my head and right in front of me, under the christmas tree lay our christmas presents. one of them was actually not under the tree cause it wouldn't fit. it was huge wrapped in those 50kg bags that you put flour in. it was my brand new bicycle ( i was about ten). i have no idea how they did it. but i didn't hear a thing and the tree was right under my nose.
the second christmas that i remember was amazing in the way that i really thought i saw santa. as previously i was sitting as close to the christmas tree as possible waiting for santa. i was getting impatient. and suddenly outside on our veranda i heard a noise. my parents heard it also. i jumped out of the house (my parents only convinced me that that was what i should do), not seeing anyone in the garden i decided to hide behind the hare's-foot fern that stood on the veranda. suddenly as i jumped behind the flower pot i bumped into a pair of muddy boots that i was persuaded belonged to santa, who had just turned invisible and hopped out of his shoes. if it wasn't for my mother who ran out of the house and told me that there was a rumble on the street that might mean santa is there and i should check it out, i would have stood there flabbergasted. i ran out but to my dismay i didn't find santa. dissapointed i returned to the house only to find out that santa had already been there. i missed him again but this time i got close. i saw his boots.
At Christmas I no more desire a rose,

this years winter

 

well i never thought that i would hear myself saying this one day but it dawned on me not so long ago that i d like to go back to nigeria in the near futur. who would have thought taking into account how much europe has to offer and how little nigeria can offer. i grew up in a place where supermarkets, cinema's, cable tv and many more things didn't exist for a very long time. as a kid i remember waiting for sunday to watch an old indian movie on nigerian tv. the cinema wasn't a place you went to so we were basically stuck with old video tapes that we had or our friends did. (i couldn't tell you how many times i've seen rio grande, singing in the rain or hello dolly). when it comes to shopping not much has changed. alright i have to give some credit the the great lebanese commerce that has opened 3-5 supermarkets in kano that actually started selling real magnum icecream, galaxy chocolates, kellog's cornflakes, dr peppers, good shampoo's, soaps and the list runs on and on and on. clothes shopping though is a different story. there is no such thing as needing a new dress for a special evening. you have two options: find something in your closet that the people you're gonna be spending the evening with haven't seen or find something in your friends closet that they haven't seen. most of the clothes you have you buy while you're on vacation out of nigeria. there are so many things that i could list but you'd have to see it to understand it.
i guess that it's mostly the people that i miss, for one thing it s great to sit down with somebody and ten years later remember the days when you use to sit under a mango tree and eat green mango's with salt wondering how much your stomach could take; or when you got bitten by her 5 year old sister so bad you went crying home. and then also they are the people who have been through what you've been through seen what you've seen grown up in the same enviroment as you. they're struggles even though motivated by different things are so clear and understandable to you. 

 

 

a little try

C'était il y a bien des années, dans un royaume au bord la de la mer, qu'une jeune fille vivait, habituee aux voyages, et cette fille voulait se retrouver secure dans le bras d un homme car le solitude est devenue inacceptable.

Il etait encore un enfant comme elle l'était dans ce royaume au bord de la mer, mais ils se aimaient d'un amour sans pareil, cette jeune fille et lui, un amour qui les avait aveugles aux ecarts qui les separes.

C'était pourquoi, il y a longtemps, dans ce royaume au bord de la mer, un vent sortit d'un nuage, reveillant la fille et lui, de sorte que leurs chemins les emportèrent loin de eux-meme, pour les separer dans deux coins differents dans ce royaume au bord de la mer.

Les Anges, sans même la moitié de cette joie dans les Cieux, les enviaient, cette fille et lui : --
Oui! C'en était la raison (comme le savent tous les hommes, dans ce royaume au bord de la mer) qu'une nuit sortit un vent d'un nuage, reveillant et persuadant la fille de changer son avis.

Mais un jour cette fille avait doute de sa decision et esseyant de retrouver le bonheur se rencontrerait avec lui mais il a dit que jamais ni les Anges dans les hauts Cieux,
ni les démons au fond de la mer, ne pourraient refaire le passe de la belle fille : -

Car la lune ne lance jamais ses rayons sans la faire rêver de l aventure; --
Et les étoiles ne se lèvent jamais, sans qu elle sente les vagues rugissantes
de les chemins de la mer, et ainsi, durant toute la marée nocturne, elle repose auprès
De sa chérie! son amour, sa vie et sa mariée, avec sa valise, là-bas au bord de la mer,
Dans son chemin, près de la sorti

 

well i just managed to pass a spanish language exam with quit a good grade which means i might be going to mexico this summer to participate in a project. cross your fingers for me people 

confession

well i did take a longer break and i really do not know if i will be writting often enough to interest anyone more enough
to read the blog.the reason for the silence is simple. even though my summer travelling didn't end with my last post,
i was moved away from internet access untill october. then it was too late to catch up on the week in holland and 3 weeks in amsterdam. well now that i've been in poland i have had nothing to say or to show :) here are some of the older pictures that i haven't had the time to put up.


they are some of the rare pictures i have from france and holland. the last are of the 3 great people i got to see in paris this summer.

old summer pics

  

pour rubens

  

some random photos.

  one of my favorites from this summer. (the rest are still to come) a man on the rice field.

safe haven

  i find my island of serenity here around the people i grew up with, in a place that seems to be resistant to the ruthless forces of change(it is but an illusion). no matter how long i'm gone for, when i get back i always feel like i have merely missed a few spicy details from everyone's life, that can be caught up on in a few isolated moments of conversations with my friends, and which i usually get to hear in the first hours of my being here. people don't seem to forget me and i certainly don't forget them. yet even in this private paradise peace is disturbed by perturbing incidents. in my description i tend to leave out the dark aspects, because we do want to remember the good and forget the bad. bare in mind that nigeria is a third world country filled with poverty, corruption and violence and it has but a handful of laws meant to protect the inhabitants of it's lands (and even so every law can be bypassed if the right strings are pulled). in the years i've seen tragedies played out in the lives of the people i felt close to.
not so long ago, in the middle of night, my friends house was attacked by armed robbers. a group of 15 armed men walked into their compound and tried to break into the house. they managed to make a hole in the wall and through this they hoped to get into the house. the owners of the house were awakened by the noise. my friends father got his rifle got down in front of the hole and waited.  the moment the first robber popped his head through he took a shot and killed him on the spot. he kept on shooting at anything that moved outside. this managed to keep the robbers out of the house but they stayed out and shot the house. later the police found over 200 shells outside of the house. all this time the police was waiting outside the gate too scared to come in. the robbers ran away taking the corpse with them. because of the bullets that were used the robbers were most probably from the army, explaining why they took the body. there was no further investigation and nothing could be done.
sometime it seems that we are so far away from the rest of the world and civilization. what seem to be everyday things are hard to buy in shops. ham and cheese are luxuries not talking about "good" shampoo’s, washing powders, foreign ice cream, sweets, juices etc. petrol can be bought mostly on the black market, meaning from a guy who sits on the corner of the road and sells petrol in plastic bottles of 2.5 liters for more then double the price. light and water are seldom seen at home. the phone line supplier just went bankrupt so most people only have mobile phones which they themselves started working about 6 years ago ( not counting the one the size of a medium suitcase). medical services are basic, meaning that if you have a cold or malaria you can probably get help. yes we do have hospitals but.... let me leave that unsaid. in medical emergencies most foreign or rich nigerian people are flown out of the country. nobody in the right of mind would go to the hospital here. so we privileged people have a choice but the average nigerian's last chance is a medical system comparable to the one that was available in poland around the times of world war one (plus antibiotics). to make a long explanation short i have seen light go out in the middle of an operation and there was no way to make it come back, so the operation was finished in the best way possible using candles as lighting.

minjibir

 we went on a little trip yesterday to a nearby village called minjibir. it's a small fishing village about 30 km away from kano. while driving out there it hit me how incredibly different it is to live here in nigeria compared to europe. the nigerians in the north are very friendly people. while driving around town i've noticed that when i catch eye contact with most people they tend to smile and wave. in an awkward way you know that every time you go to the market to buy something everyone is going to try to rip you off using a wide spectrum of devious tricks yet at that same market with the same people you can bet that if you pay a guy twice by mistake ( yes it does happen cause you're usually bargaining with a few people at the same time and everyone is trying to shout over everyone else),  he will actually give you the money back, or when my mom once forgot to take the shopping she made ( a few good bags of meat) the shop keepers helper came over to the house in the afternoon with the bags even though we would have never been able to find the shop we bought the food in (how the helper knew where we live is a mystery) anyway going back to the trip. As we were driving out there we passed villagers on the side of the road who were excited when they saw a car filled with white people drive by. They would smile and wave and be polite when they saw a head turn their way. Sometime near the end of the trip we got to the lake were the village fished we decided to drive over the old dam. The road looked like it wasn’t used in a while. In the middle we met a few fishermen who we asked whether the road was passable. We soon found out it wasn’t, bought a basket full of fresh fish and took a million of pictures. They were very open and didn’t let us go for an hour. Chatting, joking and making small talk.  
For dinner we had tilapia ( the small fish we bought). We fried them and because they were so small we ate them together with most of the skeleton ( excluding the head {we did remove the insides first thought}). Once well fried the tail becomes crispy as does most of the fish.

a mother and her child at the market

  

break under a tree, a little history of kano, renovation of the kano wall

i grew up in what some call the second largest city in nigeria (which i myself would not consider so cause of port harcourt in the south). Kano, the capital of the north, (or at least of Kano state), with a population of just under 4 million inhabitants, was founded around the first millennium AD. It was a prosperous hausa emirate, and an important stop in the Saharan trade route. Things changed in the 19th century when the emir, local leader, was overthrown by Usman Dan Fodia, while the latter led the jihad against kano. The emir is still the an important figure till this day. Soon afterwards Nigeria became a british colony. In modern day history kano has been one of the first states to adopt sharia as state law. It is a major city of the cotton industry. Most of the population are Hausa but a certain number of Yoruba and Ibo (mostly being Christians while the hausa are muslims) have moved to kano in order to run businesses. They have not been able to assimilate and still live in a separate part of town Sabon Gari (new town), a busy and lively area filled with shops, businesses, bars, and a huge outdoor market. this area lies right beside walls and one of the gates to the old town, the very heart of hausa kano, where the price of living space cost more then anywhere else in kano. Many times riots have broken out over smaller or bigger matters and they always ignite in Sabon Gari.

local school, rucola-dried tomato salad recipe

rucola-dried tomato salad.
1. cut the rucola into inch pieces
2.+ sun dried tomatoes in olive oil cut into slivers
3.+crushed garlic+parmezan 

lunch time

around 11 30 in the morning women start going around houses and factories selling food for lunch. they sell pastries, gari, meat, milk with dumplings.

an addition to the previouse post.

  

the week and pictures

i took a little break from writing lately. mostly because there wasn't time to write about kano in general and i needed a little time out for some personal stuff. 4 weeks at home are now starting to feel too short. i barely just got here and i m about to go back so i'm trying to use my time wisely and i have put aside taking pictures etc.(the truth is that i'm wondering if i shouldn't stay here for another month) in addition to that i got sick for a few days, and a few days were taken up by one of my best friends who came to visit me for the weekend. i was looking forward to his visit but i never expected it too be so painful. he got majorly fucked in the past three years and in a way i can not say that i don't feel that i had a part in it. life hasn't been good to some of us.
we grew up in a very specific environment missionary school in a small peaceful town, where we were surrounded by people who kept there eye out on us and were the rules were totally different then the one's of the outside world. we were sheltered from a lot of situations, such as first clashes with sex and drugs. our problems were a little different. we would get in trouble for saying "shut up" or other silly violations. i remember one day when i was walking hand in hand with one of my best friends around school and the school psychologist approached us and scalded us for breaking the schools regulations. at first i didn't know what she had in mind. then she told us that we were too close to each other. the school had a rule about keeping a distance of at least the width of a bible between a girl and a boy. i laughed because i thought she was joking. i soon found out she was dead serious. only a handful of people smoked cigarettes when we were in high school ( almost never on the school campus). kissing was also a very rare sight and even the most long term couples didn't do much more then kiss. those were our school problems but when we finished school we were all sent to europe or the states were we were on our own and were the world was a bit more cruel. a lot of people i know got married soon after high school; some because they had to (kids were on the way) others because they thought that it was the best thing to do (they did believe very strongly that sex before marriage is a sin) and a big percentage of them are unhappy. yet still the majority of us managed to handle it quite well.

kano.car problems, sharia, talking to people

well once we got one of our two cars to start working i got out of the house with my mom. first we had to do the shopping, meaning go to the local out door market and buy vegetables. mostly the meat and fish comes knocking on our door. someone somehow hears that we're back in town and comes to the house with the fish we probably need. so the other day we got an 8kg fish still gasping for air. we had to bargain the price, clean the fish, take the insides out and cut it into pieces. anyway shopping at the market always reminds me that i'm back home. i'm greeted there with either one of two phrases. some say "good morning doctor" while the most say "hello baby" since they've known me from times when my mom use to take me there in a baby pram.
kano became a sharia state a in 2001, meaning that the state is under islamic law while the country itself has it's own law system. it has caused a few problems that most of the world has heard of. right in the beginning when the sharia was enforced a man was found guilty on the charge of stealing a cow, the punishment was having his right hand chopped off. after they went through with the amputation the man went to court and got recompensed from the nigerian government for his material loss. two women were also found guilty on the charge of adultery and were to be stoned. the whole world started writing petitions to save them.
on the other side of the medal the side that us insiders see, sharia had not changed much in town.(actually i believe it didn't change much for most people.) during the first months most restaurants stopped selling alcohol and most muslim women started covering themselves. at a certain point a sharia police was called to order. one of their most "admired" deed was pulling off women from motorbike taxies, or so called achaba's. it didn't last long since the police was found to be illegal and had to be recalled. as for the other things. alcohol is still sold in all of the restaurants. once the owners realized that sharia was not for real they brought it back. the old town still sells all the types of alcohol you could want. sharia was just a way for some people to make money. in other words just another african scenario.

one of my favorites and a good description of what today has brought

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

-William Butler Yeats

kano; first impresions

the flight home was full. there might have been two empty seats on a plane that could carry up to 250 people. i was surprised that i only knew one person on that flight. usually i would drop into old friends, but i guess the middle of the summer holidays is not the best time for people to be coming to kano. we had an interlanding in abuja, the new nigerian capital, during which the passengers that were flying to abuja would get of the plane and the ones flying to kano would be moved for a few hours into a waiting room while the plane was cleaned and the crew was change, fresh and rested ready for another trip to amsterdam. only a handful of 30-35 people filled the waiting room and i started to wonder if in the years to come klm would still be flying to kano if such a small % of people went flew there. the trip from abuja to kano takes 45 minutes by plane.
i arrived at the small ruined aminu kano airport that hasn't changed during the time i can remember it.(i've been flying into it for 22-23 years) only the arrival times have changed. as i took the first steps off the plane to the metal transportable stairs that lead onto the runway i was astonished that it was actually cooler then both poland and holland have been in the past few days. soon i was among the scattered herd of a handful of people rushing to get to the passport control. i guess we all remembered what it use to be like when all the passengers would get off in kano, and only the fastest runners, or those with a special agent would get out of the airport in a bearable time. the special agents were people that you would pay to do all of the formalities at the airport for you. if you were lucky someone would get your passport from you right as you got of the plane, and you would leave the runway through a back gate. usually though they would meet you right before the passport control take your documents, and get everything done for you. all you had to do was wait at home for your luggage. only one such agent was there this time, and i'm happy that he was there cause he's a friend of mine that i was glad to see.
the drive back home made me realize that there are no street lamps anywhere in the town. the only lights on the roads come from the houses that line them. it's funny how we forget things that are so obvious in one place but not so obvious in another. the first thing that hit me when being back home was air conditioning in every room, no water in the pipes, no light other then the one we were creating in our very own generator, no telephone cause it got switched off, no food in the fridge, and no car because it stopped working when no one used it. but i am home. no where else do i find so much peace. i attach a few pictures of normal creatures i find on my front porch.

the trip; amsterdam

the trip went unbelievably well. no luggage got lost, there was no delay, and no problems at the nigerian airport with the customs officers. the only thing that i would have wished to change was the sprained ankle i got while carrying a suitcase down the stairs. it sort of spoiled my plans of running around amsterdam for the whole day. amsterdam is one of my favorite cities in europe. i spent some time there every year since i was little and until i moved to poland i could have said that i knew it better then lodz, my parents home town. that's the town where i ate my first oyster. i don't remember the incident because i was around five. in the past, klm would offer a free hotel and meal to all it's passengers that could catch a connecting flight the same day, which meant that we qualified for a free vacation every year cause there was no way we could get from poland to amsterdam early enough to catch the flight to nigeria. well during one of the trips my mother listened to a waiter in a restaurant and ordered me a grilled steak instead of kiddy food. the steak had a succulent fresh oyster on top. the waiter regretted his kind advice cause the moment i had the oyster in my mouth i sent it flying through the table straight at him. that was my first experience with those salt water creatures but not the last. A few years later I repeated the try, in Antibe, but that’s a story for another day.

A few other things have changed since the beginning of my flying days. I remember when smoking was allowed onboard. The tail end of the plane was reserved for smokers but the smoking section and the non smoking section were never divided in any way to block the smoke from crawling into the front. Another thing that I remember and in a way miss was the tradition of clapping after every landing. It was a way for the passengers to express their thanks to the pilot for a good landing. Nobody does that anymore and it’s a pity.

polish politics, b day salads, and others

i'm counting down the days till the beggining of my summer vacation. i'm at 4 days and 22h till departure. every time i watch the news it makes me all the happier to be leaving and motivates me more to try to get out of the country as soon as possible. in the shadows of major conflicts in the middle east we're going through political so called progress (in my view it's degression). old veterans of polish politics, living or spending time abroad, are being called immoral by the present government for their criticizm of the head of the country's decisions and resolutions of certain situations, while other old veterans (or should i say old criminals) are comming back to power, though the heads of state denied such a possibility mere hours ago and no sane mind would have thought it possible. this is the country i will not choose to live in, at least not for now.
on a brighter note here's a recipy that a galician friend asked me for yesterday and that i thought might find other people interested in. i made it for my b day and on one other occasion i can't remember.

chicken curry salad
1. boil two chicken breast, and a few eggs (they don't add much taste but they do add volume). when boiled cut the eggs and chicken into small pieces
2. add a can of corn and a few slices of pinapple cut into small pieces.
3. add cheese cut into small cubes or if you're lazy grated.
4. + mayonase and a lot of curry.

and a certain tiger from the praha zoo.
p.s to answer a few people's question; no we do not have tigers in africa. (only in certain zoo's)

Hermelin: the czech way to make cheese taste better

the last few days have been a bit hectic. i'm leaving for nigeria in about ten days and i need to get the last things settled. for that reason i've been going to warsaw this week to get my visa and ticket. but it's nothing interesting to write home about. anyway here are a few pictures of poland.
on the other hand i've been in the kitchen quite a lot, taking advantage of the summer vacation and my parents filling the fridge. i can't say that i miss the food from prague. the czech cuisine is really filled with dishes like the "wiepro-knedlo-zelo" meaning fatty pork piecies with oily saurkraut and the knedliki ( long dumplings cut into slices). every main dish is covered with a sauce. some of their appetizers weren't that bad though. one of my favorites was their pickled stuffed hermelin. so here's the recipe for everyone who misses it.

1. take an onion cut it up into mush (or just really small pieces) mix it with a few mashed cloves of garlic add black pepper and a red chilli pepper or some red chilli.
2. take a camembert cheese. cut it into half put the previosly prepared mix in between the two halves.
3. place the camembert into a small jar and cover it with olive oil.
4. leave out for at least three days. if you like stronger tastes and it's not too warm you can leave it out for a week or more.

crash! bum!! bang!!!

a single e mail today send me off into a reminicing trip. millions of thought and memories going through my head while staticity surounds me. no perspectives for change, no perspectives for adventure and excitement await me in poland yet i'm here without a real good reason while i know what awaits me elsewhere. this was the reason i was looking sceptically at an erasmus year in prague. i didn't want to go cause finally, after those hard moments that followed leaving home and leaving vichy, i managed to hibernate half of myself and live as a partial me in this little world were NOTHING comes my way. where i'm just a shadow of a person to others because no body here is a friend. i stopped worrying about the fact that everyday looks like the one before. that year in prague could declench everything from the beggining. the year was amazing, like life should be, and like life was not taking into account the 3 years in poland. suprisingly the avalanche didn't directly start because of prague. all that prague did was reawake the other half, make me want again and make me sit down and write all those e mails i should have written years before to keep in touch with those people who have meant so much. todays e mail was an awakening that i needed and am very thankful for.

standby

lodz has always been a "standby" station for me. other then studying there is nothing i can do here. it drives me nuts especially during the summer time. anyway i have 18 more days to go and i'm going back home. so far there are no new pictures so here are a few older one, again from prague, but this time my friends that i miss and think of.
thanks to you guys i will have beatifull memories. it's great that you were all there almost from the beggining (in tomeks case from his beggining)

and once again...

ok one of my last tributes
to the beautiful city
of prague