Hi everyone! I realise if you're reading this you will most likely be my family and friends (and therefore obliged to) but just in case......I am a volunteer for VSO and this is a blog about my experiences of life in Nigeria, first I was briefly in Calabar and now I'm in Abuja the capital city. You may also find some random references to uses I find for the tools on my Swiss army knife as well as my reflections on my everyday life as a VSO volunteer, just go with it.




Tuesday, 2 August 2011

A police escort

Picture the scene if you will, it’s ten past eight on Tuesday morning and we’re running a little late, it’s raining pretty hard and we’re standing at the our usual spot trying to catch transport to work but everything is full because of the weather so it’s not looking good. Then a policeman comes and stands next to me. He asks if we’re trying to get a drop. I tell him no drop (because we can’t afford them), but he’s quite insistent that we should be trying to get one. “No drop, we’re only going to Watt” I tell him. “Ok sister, you will come with me”.
Normally you wouldn’t accept lifts from strangers but he’s a policeman so it’ll be ok, right? Well we thought so, so he flags down a car, tells the man he is paying and that we are stopping at Watt to drop us off on the way. I feel a bit unsure about this but get in the back of taxi with Sarah anyway. He then asks where we are going next so I tell him that we work in Bayside on Edem Street and we normally get transport to Watt and then walk down to Edem Street from there. Apparently we are not allowed to do this in rain, so they will take us all the way. He wouldn’t let us pay anything and dropped us at the door of the office. It was a very lovely experience, all done out of goodwill and nothing expected in return. I have no idea where the policeman was going but I’m pretty sure our bit of the journey was definitely not on the way.
When we did get in the office I took the opportunity to take some photos of our surroundings and have updated the album so you can see where I work and the area around it. It was a very grey morning I’m afraid but at least it had stopped raining!

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