I've done myself a disservice, not writing about Nigeria right afterwards, assuming that my little scraps of paper would suffice. Let me rustle through them...oh, and I already feel restless again and want to go somewhere. I miss Europe, outdoor hot chocolate, riding underground transportation with friends, blocking out fellow passengers with Coldplay and John Mayer to become complete absorbed in the orange plastic seats with no lumbar support so that it almost seems like I could belong with the rush of green, ages-old foilage outside. The foilage that seems to represent a completely different life, where people value the greenness a little more and appreciate its history and what its presence seems to represent -- the sturdiness of the ages, the robustness of civilizations as stewards, the paucity of humanity.

Oh, and the hope of lands unknown to my wanderlust heart, my optimistic roaming eyes constantly searching for the set of eyes that will catch mine and change everything, the idea that the rest of my life could be just beyond the next scrubby brush along the road, on the other side of that lichen fluffing up from in between the sidewalk cracks. Sometimes -- oh, those few "some" times -- when I'm oblivious I think I could be satisfied with what I have now, forever. But those sometimes are not oftentimes. And I don't want them to be, either.

I want to be the sort of person who naturally wants to give away Saints tickets.

But I digress, back to the hinterland.

I pulled out my note sheets, one white rectangle from the Al Khaleej Palace Hotel in Dubai (on which it looks like I was a captive compulsive notetaker sacrificing words to the Gods of Grammer in fear of running out of room on my ONLY ONE PIECE OF PAPER in all of the modern Arab world); one "Zee Sheer Strip" bandaid package; and one large, placemat-sized church bulletin from Christ Baptist Church in Gbagada, Lagos, Nigeria (message: "With God All Things Are Possible") (Oh, don't forget Prayer Band at 8 this Sunday!)

We can forget notebook #2, the bandaid, because it reads more like a list. This is probably inherent in the natural bandaid shape, the lenght/width ratio of which lends itself to supporting only two-word bullets ("--email Vincent; --malaria pill!; --spray stuff" and on it goes. I wish I remembered what the "spray stuff" referred to; maybe my kill-small-children-with-Deet bug repellent? So on to what the good ol' Al Khaleej has to reminisce (all of which I think is from Nigeria, written on stolen hotel paper).


11/23/06
Why does wealth encourage isolation and fences? To pass into the neighborhood, there's a large metal gate accompanied by menacing signs about needing an entry sticker, proof of residency, and 3 large pineapples. The caked-dirt roads with potholes the size of neighboring countries greet our 1978 Toyota van. I'm pretty sure that this van was once used for human trafficking in California, shipped to [insert stereotypical American College Town here] for a "beat the car up fundraiser!", and finally steam-boated to Ethiopia, used for target practice on the Somalian border, and accidentally dropped off in Nigeria on its way to the oft-visited tourist country of Liberia. Ok, I'm exaggerating a bit. It was probably more like a 1985 Toyota.

The roads were funneled through neatly carved ditches, each about 18" wide. These ditches were multi-purposed, clearly designed for synergistic effect. Part drainage ditch, part trash receptacle, part public restroom. Rising out the backside of the ditches were the thick concrete walls surrounding every single house and apartment complex, with the violence-deterring addition of glass shards poking up from the top of the cement. They would have been pretty, a sun-catching array of colorful broken bottles, except for what their presence implied. This was a nice neighborhood, too, mid- to upper-middle class.

So why, when we have material wealth, why do we feel the need to keep it hidden and eventually ourselves hidden? Why are we so afraid of each other and our potential for evil?

***

There's this dichotomy of advertising here, with an enormous billboard for Hewlett Packard's latest phone-nintendo-ipod-bubblemaker-timemachine posted above a dilapidated, corrogated tin sheeted roof with the week's trash burning in the front yard. Disappointingly enough, consumption seems to be a universal human value even when the only consumption that's really important for the people in that house is probably what the next meal is going to be. There are ads for other technology products passing by as I see traditional tribal markings on the man in the car next to me. There are people swarming the inches between the car "lanes" selling everything from new garage doors to sunglasses to fried plantains (I promise we saw people hawking all of those items, plus a guy carrying a new [huge] tv on his Vespa-equivalent motorbike), intermixed with war victims from nearby countries: teenagers walking with their fists for lack of legs in a country where we didn't see any wheelchairs anywhere, poor mothers with their deformed babies in their laps. And because these sights are so ubiqioutous, I found my heart grow numb very quickly to the mess of humanity strewn on the roadsides. I felt cold, helpless, scared that I could be alive while this sort of suffering still exists when the worst homelessness in America only has to face cold, not machetes.

As we continue to strive to find familiarity in the foreign, when will the foreign become familiar, become important to us, become important enough to change? When will that twelve-year-old in the median with the face of someone who's seen their sister killed strike us to care as we would for an American-looking face? When will there be some subjective American political-economic value placed on that which has no valuation system that can be given by man?

Even as all cities begin to look the same and the world feels smaller, the people still retain their diveristy. Never before have I felt so strongly that my face has betrayed me. I could feel the uncontrollable red warmth spread up through my cheeks when I looked around and saw that I clearly did not belong in some situations, that I wasn't wanted there simply because of the color of my skin and the random brown spots on my nose. I wasn't accepted into this -- something that hadn't felt so foreign, something that gosh! we're all just people trying to dream and reach and love! -- this other world of culture and conversations. In those repeated moments I knew what it was to be black in southern America. In those repeated moments I knew what it was to be [insert every other ethnicity that doesn't look stereotypically 'white', plus gay people!, here] in southern America. And it disgusted me to think that I have ever unintentionally, ignorantly, made anyone feel like that.

I'm also feeling intense disappoint. For so long I genuinely believed that skin color didn't matter (or, rather, shouldn't matter) only to be ostracized by my own. Are there cultural differences highlighted more by color or by national borders? And it's unnerving for this difference to begin to feel normal, to feel acceptable.

***

The snapshot of the country we've seen so far would encourage despair in even the most optimistic UN supporter. But the richness of culture, traditions, joy in life without artificial society-imposed goals and definitions of 'success' beg what a nation is supposed to look like? How do you clean up what's here, for the environment's sake and the health of the people living with 15 million of their closest friends, with the problems so massive and large-scale? How do you ever start? I think Nigeria needs a bubble plot of recommendations.


I'm exhausted, so I'll have to continue my Nigeria recap next time!
Goodnight, world.