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.