Projects Office and My Home

Bags of peanuts shared with rats.

Storage room door where bag found.

I have not had a lot of excitement here this last week. Mostly, technical work here in the house and lots of meetings. I did meet one of the big rats that live in the house and patrols at night. I got up in the middle of the night to use the toilet.The rat saw my light and ran and hide between the toilet and the wall. This was not where I wanted it hide when I wanted to use the toilet. I got a good look at it before I gave it a clear escape route and chased it back into to the Parlor.  (Maybe I should carry my camera with me at all times. It would have been a good picture.) The first week I was here I left four small bags of peanuts out on the table overnight. The next morning there were only two bags on the table and two bags by the door to the storeroom, I left hot peppers sitting out one night. and they took some out of the bag and chewed on them. They have not gotten into the pantry where I store most of my food. Now my hot pepper and onions are in a bowl on top of the refrigerator.

(Clicking on double clicking on the pictures will make them larger. Then you have to close the picture and you will come back to the blog.)

I think I will give you a tour of the house. This house is on the LCCN Jimeta Mission Compound which is adjacent to the Jimeta Cathedral. The Government Primary School used to be the LCCN School. Back in the 1973 the  Government took over all of the schools and health facilities from the churches and said they wanted to improve them. But in reality the opposite happened. Now the elected government has allowed churches to have schools and health facilities as long as they operate with government licenses and to government standards. The Cathedral has the western third of the complex with church, offices and their Primary and Secondary School. The Mission Compound is the rest of the compound with the LCCN Deaf Center building (under the trees), Deaf Church (under construction), a large office building shared by the LCCN Audit Office and Christian Association of Nigeria Adamawa State Chapter, the Missions Afrika Development Office (where I used to live), the Projects Office (where I am staying this year), a small soccer pitch with several tree within the pitch and various small buildings. The soccer pitch is probably less than 50 meters long and the west end must be at least a meter higher than the east end. Several times I have seen the ball get stuck in the branches of the trees that are on the pitch on just beyond the goal.

This building was Elisabeth Holtegaard's house when she lived in Jimeta as a missionary from Denmark. She has been returning and living here for a few months per year and working on organizing the boxes and boxes of records that were kept by the Danish Missionaries from 1913 to the early 2000's. The church is working on building an archive building at Bronnum Lutheran Seminary that will be a safe storage area. While I am typing this the Archive Committee is scheduled to be meeting in the dinning room. This old house is easily invaded by termites who love to eat paper and of course rats like paper for their nests. The house has two bedrooms, bathroom, parlor, dining room, kitchen, and several storage rooms. It was constructed before 1950's by the Danish Missionaries.

The building I used to stay at (now Mission Afrika Development Office) was built by American Lutheran Missionaries and called the American Guesthouse. More recently, it has been called the falling down house. It has several walls that are falling away.

There is an addition and a porch on the back the Projects Office house. Also there is an old round mud block house in the back. The addition, back porch, and round house are used by Joel and Regina and their children for a home. Joel is a former security guard for the church. By giving them housing they provide additional security. In the rainy season they plant okra,  groundnuts and greens for income. I did stay in the Project Office house in the back bedroom in either 2009 or 2010. The back bedroom gets less breeze and has window out to the porch where Regina and the kids spend most of their time. It was not as private and a little hotter than the front bedroom where I am sleeping this year. They have a pit latrine with a concrete slab and used metal roofing sheets as walls. This is one location I wanted to included a demonstration ventilated Improved Pit Latrine as a part of the 25-40 Foundation Grant. That did not work out and I am looking for a different source of funding. Since this area is used for weddings, conventions and other things it is a good location for a demonstration VIP latrine.

View form soccer pitch

This is a large house for one person. It is used as both the Projects Office, the Health Board Water Office, Health Board Jimeta Office, Health Board Education Office, and a meeting place for various small groups. It is rarely used for living. Elisabeth used come yearly but had not been back since 2013 for the Centennial Celebration.

Front Door

The  main entrance is from the front porch to what I call the Parlor. The door faces out to the main road through this part of town. Jimeta is a bustling urban center with a population estimated in the 600,000 range.  It is mostly a government center and part Yola it houses most of the local Federal and almost all of the State offices.

Solar tea and solar battery on porch

 You will notice that a lot of the glass is replaced by plywood. The large open area to the front and left as you face the house is used by kids and adults for soccer. The adults use the larger pitch with wooden goals and the kids use the area directly in front of the house. They put down rocks for goals right in front of the doors and window. They use the windows to stop the ball so they do not have to chase it. Mostly, they do this when no one is using the building in the mornings and evenings.

Thru Parlor, Dinning, to Kitchen Door

To the right of the Parlor, as you enter, is the dining room and then the kitchen is off the dining room. This side of the house gets full sun and is like an oven. It averages 2 degrees C higher than the bedroom I am using and has less breeze. The Parlor is used by Yakubu Bulama for his office as the Health Board Water Coordinator and Projects Coordinator (unpaid position with LCCN Headquarters).

The kitchen is off of the dining room. The red plastic basin is my washing water, the blue basin is where I rinse with borehole water then rinse with hot boiled water. The taller blue bucket is borehole water. It has a faucet on the bottom for filling my teapot or pots for cooking. The orange container is also filled with borehole water I can use for cooking. The larger black container on the floor I mostly use for cleaning water. It appears clean but I have not emptied it and cleaned it so I prefer not to use it for cooking. The tall silver container has Ceramic filters in the top section and the bottom is storage. The stop cock on the bottom section is stuck. I use this as a reserve. When I boil water for tea or oatmeal the leftover water goes into the blue thermos bottle for a second cup of tea or rinsing dishes. The four burner stove has a cylinder that still had cooking gas in it. I have so far only used one burner at a time. There is a second tank in the storage room and it feels like it also has cooking gas.

Behind the stove is a storage room used for the Water Program and stores the generator that is used when there is need for power and there is not power from the government power grid or from the Cathedral large generator.

To the left of the stove and door to the storage room is the refrigerator with my bowl of onions and peppers on top of it. The fan that blows air across the condenser coils is sitting on the floor. We keep the ceiling fan running to keep air circulation around the coils. We have had almost continuous power last couple of days so the sachets of water in the freezer are blocks of ice. Unfortunately, the vendor we buy our sachets from was out of the Faro brand that used a thick strong plastic bag. We had to buy the cheaper water and they tend to break when frozen.

This morning breakfast

Across from the refrigerator is the screened pantry, I use this to store my food. I have a small bag of rice, cans of mixed veggies, baked beans, canned mini weiners,  powdered milk, instant oats, box of Kellogg Fruit and Bran, some ginger cookies, cans of sardines, tuna, salmon, mackerel, spices, roasted ground nuts (peanuts), a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread.

Breakfast is hot tea, milk, oatmeal and bread or tea, milk and a bowl of cereal. Lunch, if I have lunch, is usually a sandwich, peanut butter, hard boiled egg or tuna fish. Dinner I will cook some rice, then fry some onions and peppers, add in spices and a can of sardines or mackerel. When I use sardines I fry the onions and peppers in the oil from the sardines. I have not decided what I am going to do with the salmon. The can was marked as 500 Naira but when the scanned it the current price was 700 naira ($2.30 at 305N/$).

Looking back through the dinning room to the parlor/office is the small desk Yakubu uses under the ceiling fan.The table and couch, by the wall, I use for my computer at the edge of the ceiling fan breeze. I took the picture to the right while I was writing this. The Archive Committee is having a meeting in the dining room and Yakubu is working on reports. Behind the couch is the hallway to the bathroom and bedrooms.

The house is no longer connected to the water supply system. The toilet tank is not connected to the toilet. The toilet is flushed with a bucket of water. After my dish water and rinse water from the kitchen get dirty I use it to flush the toilet. I purchased water two days ago. The water vendor pushes a cart filled with 13 plastic 20 liter containers. 260 liters of  water fills the large blue barrel and about every other bucket or water container in the house. To get here from the borehole he pushed the cart mostly up a slight hill to the Cathedral gate and back down to the house. The water point is behind the house and across the street. For this he asks 130 Naira. I gave him 150. This is equal to less than a half a dollar. If he is lucky he will deliver 6 to 8 loads a day. This is a very short distance for a trip (close to 1/2 mile round trip). If he does not own his own cart and cans he rents it for  200 Naira per day and pays 20 naira to fill his 13 containers. For 8 trips his cost would be 360 Naira and he will receive 1040 Naria. His daily maximum take home would be 680 Naria ($2.23 at the current black market exchange rate.). You never see a fat water man.

On either side of the bathrooms are bedroom. To the right is a room that now is used mostly for storage. To the left is a room used for some storage of archive material and I am using it for a bedroom. They stacked up two mattresses on the floor by the window to make a bed. I hung my mosquito net from various points in the room. The windows stay open most of the time. When I have wind from the west or from the south I get breeze. When I have power I have the ceiling fan working. Opposite of the bed is table with some old computers owned by Yakubu. He has a shop that he sells agricultural chemicals from during the farming season. Most of the year is sits empty. He is trying to turn part of it into an copy shop and place where people can rent computers by the hour. My bags are stored on the table with the computers. There is a wardrobe on one wall (not shown) where I hang my shirts and pants. Socks and underwear are kept in my bag.

While I was writing this post a group came and put up a tent and off loaded a lot of chairs. Later in the day they put up a second tent closer to the street. This indicates that there will be a wedding reception in the open area between the tents tomorrow (Saturday). They will have a DJ and loud music. With the Youth Fellowship Convention at the same time this place will be busy tomorrow.

The local kids usually notice the tent and will put on their best clothes to crash the wedding reception. The reception usually has a dinner served in Styrofoam containers. The local kids get the left overs form the containers before they get piled and burned. If the party is large the kids get a lot to eat. One year we had three receptions simultaneously. The kids took food home for their families that Saturday.

I hope this has given you a little insight into life in Jimeta, Nigeria. I know what I experience is nothing like what the "normal" person's life is like. I have the capability to buy whatever I want and move to an air conditioned room is the heat becomes too unbearable for me. I could have been working on one of the projects but instead I decided to spend most of the day writing this post.

Yesterday, during a meeting I asked if it was Tuesday or Wednesday and was surprised when they said Thursday. Tomorrow I have several reports Yakubu gave me to get updated on what is happening and will try to get some walking in. Sunday I will attend both the English Service and the Sign Language Service. They are currently holding services in the former Pre-School building which is a concrete slab with corrugated metal sides and roof. Fortunately most of it is shaded by trees or it would be an oven.