Benin City

Although as a general rule we stayed inside Bethel walls in Nigeria except for meetings and field service, we did have one opportunity to go fabric shopping in Benin City in the middle of our stay.  A Bethel bus with a driver was organized and we prepared for our trip.  How does one prepare if the bus is all organized?  Well, one must keep in mind that public restrooms in this market are non existent.  However, if you get dehydrated it's a drag.  A careful balance must be maintained.  You must drink no more or less than you sweat.  It's important to be hydrated BEFORE you leave too.  So, the night before I made sure to drink plenty of water.  And then I woke up early and drank 2 or 3 water bottles, finishing my last bottle about 2 hours before we left.  That way I could meet my needs in my own very nice western bathroom and still be hydrated.  Then, you don't start drinking water again til you begin sweating.  I prepared a re-hydrating salt and sugar water bottle and we took a few other water bottles too.  We drank them all. And we had to buy sodas too.  And we didn't have to go to the bathroom til we got home.  We left around 8:30 and got back around 4 or 4:30 I think.  

We really enjoyed the market, it reminded us in many ways of Myanmar's markets.  There are colors and people everywhere:

The drain in the middle is for the rainwater.  And if you DO have a bathroom emergency, that's pretty much it as far as we knew.  So as I said, prepare in advance. :)  And stay out of the drain.  It had rained recently though, it was pretty clean looking.

Stacks of fabric in every color.

You might notice that there aren't many people in our pictures.  This is because, as I've mentioned before, taking pictures in the open is difficult there, you have to have permission.  The best thing is to take a picture without permission is to take one of your friend, and place them on the side and crop them out later if you don't want them in the picture.  That way, people will not realize what you are doing.

As we walked along the stalls we were constantly greeted.  We carried magazines in our hands and gave them to many of the people we talked to.  And some would even approach US and ask for them.  I think I placed 12 and so did Matt, and we ran out too!  Should have brought more!!

One stall was owned by a sister and she was so kind to us.  She gave us tips on prices and let us take a picture with her:

People were selling other things besides fabric, such as these snails, a delicacy:

These are just like the snails I liked to watch in Myanmar.  They don't eat them there though, at least not where we were.  These were still alive so you can guarantee freshness. They are the size of your hand.  The foot in the left corner gives a little perspective. There were lots of exotic foods to see:

Our friends took us up to the top of a nearby building so we could see market and city from a different perspective.  After a little altercation with some shopkeepers/bouncers that were offended we didn't go to their shops, we prevailed and took our pictures:

And just in case you were thinking you had too much water to drink:

You will have to find another place.

 We were glad to be able to take some pictures of the ladies of the market.  They are so busy here:  

They are so good at balancing!

Such lovely colors.

After our photo op we went to our meeting place.  We had to move locations though, as there was a fuel shortage on and we didn't want to be involved.  Our driver found us and we and got home safely, and mostly hydrated!

Also, Matt likes this picture we took on our way home, it's just random:

See the Mercedes getting buried by dirt?  No need to move it!

Memorial 2014

When we finally got our visas to go to Nigeria we were excited to know that we would be going to the Memorial in Africa.  It was our first Memorial out of the country.  There are so many experiences about the amazing attendance figures in other places and we were so happy to see it firsthand.

On a shopping trip we had purchased some Nigerian fabric and were hoping to be able to wear our matching outfits for Memorial, however mine wasn't ready.  Matt's was though:

I always stand on my tiptoes to try to be taller. Matt just gets on his tiptoes now, too.

Thanks to my wonderful friend Tera I did have an African outfit to wear though. So at least our colors coordinated.  His and Hers matching outfits is a big deal in Nigeria!

Our Memorial was the second one in our hall, so it was completely dark when we arrived.  However, we still got some pictures:

The girl I'm with is named Blessing, she was my bible student in Nigeria.

The other congregation was finishing with their Memorial so we waited outside until they were through. We tried to be somewhat quiet as all the windows were open wide!  It felt funny to be watching another Memorial that we weren't a part of ourselves.  Soon, it was our turn.  And the rush was on for the good seats!!  We ended up sitting to the left of the stage on wooden benches. At first I was excited to be able to lean against the wall, but then later on I noticed the bugs and lizard coming through the window in another window. So I sat up straight after that.

The stage looked similar to how we set it up back home:

There were cork circles on the wine glasses to keep the bugs out.

If you don't remain in your seat prior to the program you are apt to find someone else sitting in it so all were seated and stayed that way before the program:


Children made up a large part of our audience:

Cuties!!

At the end of our program it was announced that we had 434 in attendance.  Our normal attendance had been around 100-160.  All the studies and interested ones came.  It was an amazing sight, and we will never forget it!

Meet Charlie

I know you have been waiting for months to meet Charlie.  Well, here he is:

Charlie is a long time resident of Nigeria Bethel and has literally been there since the beginning of the branch in Igieduma.  Over 20 years.  He is a red-capped mangabey monkey.  He is much bigger than Darragh whom you met in the last post.  He stands maybe 2 or 2 and a half feet high at the shoulder when he stands on all fours.    Like any other monkey I've met, he loves bananas.  For awhile on Saturdays and Sundays you could see him every week in the mango grove across from our room.  He barks like a dog to let all the residents know that he is outside and would appreciate bananas.  Charlie is a banana connoisseur.  He prefers his bananas to be perfect.  Too ripe and he throws it away.  Too green and he throws it away.  Prior to eating he will smell it to make sure you aren't pawning off your bad bananas:

All the bananas we gave him were up to par.  Phew!  I totally get where he is coming from, I am super picky about my bananas too.   Probably even more so! He is relatively tame, but not like a pet.  Charlie still has some respect for the distance that should be there between people and animals.  He will take a banana out of your hand but will not touch you.  My kind of monkey.

 Charlie is very dignified.  I googled pictures of other red-capped mangabey monkeys but he is the best groomed and cleanest monkey I have seen, on the internet or in life.  His coat is so glossy and full.  He is not a common monkey and because of the bush-meat trade there are no monkeys like him around that area any more.  If you ever come to Nigeria Bethel we hope he will still be around for you to see.

 

As a side point, we are back home now. We had a wonderful trip in the U.K. on our way and got to see our family before we came back to our home.  It's nice to be in our cute apartment once more and settle back into life!  I'm planning a couple more posts on Nigeria, now that I've got my computer with me again.  Thanks for keeping up with our adventures!

In the Jungle......

Many people think that when you  come to Africa you must be going on Safari.  I think our experiences in Nigeria could rival a Safari, after all, living in a place and interacting with the culture and nature for longer than a short trip around a park must leave a deeper impression.  That being said, I would really enjoy going on a Safari. A safe one.  Maybe someday I will get to go on one, but in the meantime we got to interact and see animals daily! In fact, people that come to tour are amazed at the animals that we live with there.  Some even come just to see the animals we have within the walls.  We hope that they leave with an appreciation for the work we do, but they sure are impressed with the animals!

One of the first critters to greet us in Nigeria Bethel were the Duiker Antelope.  There are perhaps dozens within the Bethel walls but a few in particular were hand reared and are not scared to be around people.  They are pretty little antelope as you can see:

One of the more wild ones had a baby while we were there, I didn't see it at it's very smallest but I think I took this picture within the first week of it's being born:

 The adult Duikers are not very tall, perhaps they come to knee height on an average size guy.  So their babies are tiny!  So cute.  Matt said it's about the size of a Chihuahua.

Much more rare to see around are the bushbucks.  I had seen one a couple times but Matt had not so one evening we went to take a walk to an area they are most likely to hang out in: 

They are very shy, but so beautiful!

There are many other animals that have been observed or rescued by the international team over the years.  They had a pet civet for awhile, also they rescued a potto.  A potto looks a bit like a tailless lemur but it is a whole different species we were told.  It lives in the trees and somehow found itself on the roof of one of the residences.  He was rescued and returned to the trees.  It happened while we were there but I didn't get to see it except in a picture.  Which I do not have, so you can google the potto. :)  

There is also a hand reared monkey named Darragh.

He is a year old and quite mischievous.   A sister that used to be in Nigeria on construction saved him when he was a baby and bottle fed him.  He will let you hold him and play with him, but I didn't.  I don't love monkeys as a general rule. He might be my favorite yet. Top two including the one that's in the next post.  I did love watching him play, he was really funny.  However, I was more than content to simply watch.  I didn't think I could emotionally handle it if I got a scratch or bite.  :D Even though it's fine, my  mind was more at ease simply to just enjoy him from a reasonable distance.

There is another resident monkey, I will save him for the next post.  

Thanks for reading!

This started as an animal post...

Ok. After making you read about birds and lizards you may be interested in the pictures of the Mammals?  (Oh and bugs, you had to read about bugs, TWICE!) (I have more cool bug pictures though. I may or may not share them on here. We'll see. If you are interested in seeing a moth the size of a bird whose relatives terrorize our dining room at 6:30 am during morning worship and make me literally pray that it doesn't swoop on me and make me scream and embarrass myself so badly I have to leave Africa forever.....) Ah man, forget the parentheses.  Lets look at BUGS again!  Where are our buddies around the corner?  Come quick and look at these pictures! You know you are absolutely anxious to see this bird/mothzilla/cringe inducing wonder:

No? Not scary?????

Matt's hand is here to give some perspective. I swear they come even bigger than this, literally the size of small birds. Not tiny birds, the next step up. Small birds.  I'm absolutely serious.  And they somehow get into the dining room and in the morning they fly around and try to find a perch on our unfriendly sealed lights.  I track them with my eyes, you know, as an eye exercise.  I have a deeply embedded fear of moths. (It started in childhood, it's another story.)  I respect the beauty that they can be here in Africa.  (I think this is a moth anyways.  It COULD be a bird. Jury is still out on that one.)  However, I am terrified of them flying at me.  Normally, at home, I handle moth attacks by screaming crazily as they dive-bomb me in bed or in the bathroom and running/leaping/crawling away whilst yelling for Matt to GET RID OF IT NOW!  Another less dramatic alternative is hiding under my best friend's coffee table. (Remember Elsa?) Sometimes I simply close the door and make a bowl of soapy water for them to take an eternal bath in.  These are all excellent, tried and true options.  Unfortunately for me, my years of experience are utterly useless when these monsters flap around in the dining room at 6:30 a.m. and you are supposed to ask for permission to leave the table.  I have plotted out my reaction to this scenario and have decided that prayer, being absolutely still and keeping my eyes closed with my mouth sealed firmly shut until it flies away is my best option if it starts to play at my table.  Hopefully it won't be put to the test.

However, I love butterflies. Maybe Mothzilla is actually a butterfly and I've been over-reacting?  Anyways, even though it's pretty, these I'm-sure-they-are-Butterflies are prettier:

Awww!

I also have a deeply rooted child-hood fear of grasshoppers.  Apparently both my moth and grasshopper fears are learned behaviors that I acquired from other family members, and initially I didn't even mind them. I won't bore you with my grasshopper stories.  There aren't many actually. I just don't like how they jump everywhere and leave spit on your stuff.  The thing with grasshoppers is they don't usually get in your house, they mostly stay outside.  At least, the ones I have encountered.  I have been really working on my irrational moth/grasshopper fears and they ARE getting better.  So much so that I got pretty close to this guy even though I did use my macro zoom:

Isn't he the COOLEST grasshopper you ever saw? Beautiful, which isn't a word I have ever used in the same sentence as "grasshopper" until just now.  See how colorful he is?  You could even zoom on this picture to see the details better.

I have learned that I detest Sand-flies more than any other bug except mosquitoes, spiders and cockroaches.  They are all tied for first place really.  For varying reasons. Sand-flies are worth putting insect repellent on for.  No jokes here.  Another name for these is "no-see-ums" which sounds all nice, "oh, a bug you can't see, no worries."  WRONG.  I have developed the opposite of immunity to these teeny terrors.  Each time they bite me the bites itch worse and seem to last longer.  Also they get bigger.  After you are here longer, I am told that it lessens again.  I'm skeptical.  Also I'm not interested in finding out.  Instead, I'll just try to remember to reach for my repellent!

All in all, our bug experiences here have been cool, and not fear inducing.  The bugs I have pictures of are not in my room, and the only bugs in my room so far are tiny flies or ants or small spiders, dispatched by my husband the bug annihilator.  This I can handle.  The reason that I've spend to much time on them in my blog is that, there are just some amazing looking insects here.   I hope that you have enjoyed and not been bored too much by the bugs I've shared.  Next time I promise to share actual animal pictures.  Later, I will honestly try to share some of our personal adventures here, not just the buggy ones.  :)

P.S. I just googled "world's largest moth" and found out that the largest moth in the world has a ONE FOOT WINGSPAN.  I don't even know what to say about that.

Leaping Lizards!!

Who knows where that title is from?  I know my dad will guess straight away!

I know I mentioned before that we have natural mosquito control here.  Birds, bats, fish and lizards.

Boy Lizard

Girl Lizard

When I was working in the warehouse and trekking all over the place I saw dozens of these, maybe even hundreds in a day.   They are amazing bug hunters, so I don' t  mind them much.  They are also amazing athletes, as evidenced by this home video:

I mean, look at his arm muscles!  These guys just wander around, hunting bugs and doing push-ups all day.  We aren't sure why they do so many push-ups. Personally I think it's to show off.  I know they just go back to their  bush-homes and brag about who ate the most bugs, and who did the most push-ups.  They might even exchange stories of supposed bravado in outwitting the humans yet again.  I can imagine that those who are missing the ends of their tails kind of skulk in the background of those brag-fests. Its's inevitable with all these people and machines everywhere. It's definitely not because they are slow!  They run so fast, it's amazing. From laying flat out on the concrete to disappearing as you come around the corner.   Some of the guys like to chase them, usually the lizards win. They will climb anything and live anywhere.  Plus as you can see, they are really pretty to look at.  

The Birds

 Due to our location and the fact that our property actually includes some jungle within the walls, there is a wide variety of wildlife.  We don't have a picture of every animal or bird that is here but we wanted to show you some pictures of at least a few. Since I come from a Bird-watching family and have a bird as my name-sake it's fitting to give the birds first priority.  :)
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I think there might be hundreds of these birds in or near our property here.  They mostly avoid people getting to close to them.  However, I did notice that when they mow the lawns here that bunches of these birds follow the lawn mowers looking for bugs to eat.  They get surprisingly close to the mowers and when they are so distracted looking for bugs you can get quite close to them.

I think it is called a Cattle Egret

Sorry these aren't great pictures but it's a neat bird so I'm including them:

There are also a large amount of what I think are hawks:

In the evening these hawks start flying around everywhere and they seem to love this tree:

        This picture was taken near twilight so it's hard to see all the birds, but if you click on it, you will see how many there are.

One evening while we were at the pool the hawks were hunting lizards in the grass and we got really close to a couple when they swooped down.

Besides these birds there are several other interesting varieties that I haven't been able to photograph yet.  We have seen what I thought was a pelican, a Pied Crow that has a white vest and looks pretty cool and different types of swallows.  There are thousands that start darting around at night.  One evening I was walking along the covered walkways, and there were hundreds just flying everywhere. I was actually worried they would fly into me.  The new construction of walkways has left them numerous crooks and crannies to nest in so they have been taking over in some areas.  Just think of all the bugs they eat!!

I was going to do just one post on the birds and animals but I think I'll stop here and save the animals for the next one.  Hope you are all doing well, we miss our friends and family back home!