Niger Towers - Our new home

Our new home and neighborhood………








To see all the photos from this session, go to http://picasaweb.google.com/donniedayp

You are welcome!

For the longest time after our arrival, we couldn’t figure out why the Nigerians kept telling us “you are welcome” before we said thank you, but after we read about the Eyo of the Eko, we understood that they are telling we are welcome in their country. They are very gracious and friendly and very curious about Owejbos (light skinned people) especially those of us from the U.S. So, you are welcome to view our family album with all the photos if you have the time and desire. I can only add about 3 or 4 to each blog.

I feel very welcome here and interestingly enough, even more so by the Nigerians than the Owejbos. We are quite comfortable here and adjusting to our new life quite well. Chris gets more involved in his work every week and is quite satisfied with what he is doing, and they are learning that he has much more knowledge and skills than just the specific reasons they wanted him for this job. It’s a win-win.

Seems forever since I have blogged, but there was the preparing to move and then the actual event, then hiring a Steward and then the settling in. We are now settled in. Today Chris and I went for a walk in the hood and took a few shots. I will share a few within this blog but also I will give you the URL for the collection because it includes the outside of our building, the outside of the compound, our walk to get a bucket of dirt and then the insides. Hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed the walk.

We like Niger Towers a lot. We checked every single thing the day before moving and then we moved in and immediately made a list of about 6 things that were not working or had not been completed. Every day or two, we would get one thing done, and finally Chris sent an email to his Shell contacts and reported that we had asked repeatedly for a clothes dryer that worked and the new front door lock had amazing deadbolts but they needed to be adjusted. He told them if they could not get those two things done by Friday to please make us a reservation to go back to the Eko. It was a security issue among other things. We weren’t exactly without clothes. Our Steward, Emmanuel, was washing the clothes and drying them on the shower racks in the four bathrooms. Within two hours of Chris’s email, a man came to work on the deadbolt issues and two other men came with a brand new clothes dryer and another came with three telephones and installed our landlines which we didn’t even know we were getting.

Emmanuel is a joy to have in the house with me. I first met him when our airfreight shipment came in and was delivered at Alan’s flat since we had no home. Alan arranged for me to go over in the daytime when his Steward Emmanuel would be there. I asked him a few questions about how much he worked for Alan and for how long and did he work for anyone else. It sounded like he was full so I didn’t go any further, but I really like his presence. When I finished up with my airfreight research, we were walking to the door and he looked at me and said I want to be your Steward. I told him I would like very much to explore that with him at a later date. Bottom line, we have Emmanuel Monday through Friday from about 10:30 or 11 to about 4 or 4:30. He is a dream.

There is another interesting thing about Emmanuel. He reminds me so much of Kevin it’s not funny; yes, Kevin, my son. He is just a darker version. They are the same size, same build. Emmanuel can cop an attitude in an instant but mostly he is very calm and peaceful. He is 6’ tall so I will always feel safe with him when I go on my excursions. Chris likes him because he loves to iron. He even irons Chris’s tighty whities.

So, the pictures represent our new home, some inside and some out. Within the compound, there are three buildings, Block A, B & C. We are in Block B, 6th Floor, and Flat 12. There are two flats on each floor and each floor has an elevator lobby with the front doors to the two flats. The flats on our side have four bedrooms, four ½ baths. All the floors are hard surface floors with marble in the entry, living and dining room. I love plants so one day, I had the driver stop at a corner where they sell pots and plants and bought 3 pots with stands and two plants.

The thing today with taking a walk with the pink mop bucket was to get some more dirt. On our way home from the movies yesterday, I spotted at large pile of dirt not far from our home. I wanted to take both Emmanuel’s pink mop buckets (hey, he picked the color, not me), but for one of those Chris reasons that I don’t always understand, he said we should start with one. After we returned, he said next weekend, we can go back and get another bucket full. I loved the picture of him with the pink mop bucket.
Some of you know already that we have been learning to deal with power outages, flaky internet (at times) and internet outages, being stuck in elevators, etc. I set up that Skype phone with a Houston number before we left and it was great at first but then we started to have problems. We believe we have found a resolution. It has call forwarding and now that we have a landline, we forwarded the calls from the Houston Skype number to the Nigerian landline. So, Walla! You can call 1.832.632.7477; it will ring into to Skype, then after a pause it rings into the landline. We do have to have Skype open on the desktop for this to work but it works. This is also dependent upon having both the electricity and internet up and running, but electric outages are far less here that at the Eko, and we also have backup generators.

Oh, and one other bit of good news! Our container has arrived and Chris has given them his passport which they will keep until our container clears customs. They tell us about 4 to 5 weeks. We can hardly wait to have our stuff! Even if borrowed stuff is better, it’s not our stuff.

That’s about it for today. It’s near time for our new version of 60 minutes which we always watched back in the US on Sunday evening. Let us here from you anytime. We are always glad to hear from family and friends. And remember, you are welcome!

Adios!