Worse than good

I was already tired of hearing about that Danish cartoon story, so I decided to have it settled with the Pakistani of our team.

"But what the hell is all that fuss?", I threw at him around a beer (I was drinking).

He replayed that the Muslims could accept all kind of criticism about all kinds of things, except about the prophet. He explained me that the respect to Muhammad is the untouchable basis of Islamic civilization, and that, although the laws of the Koran can be questionable and criticisable, in Muhammad nobody touches.

And I got to thinking (yes, it's true that I had to ask the beer for some help) that it is actually true that there are some people that question the Koran, and it is because of it that in different countries different rules apply. We can see the example of the Sharia law in Northern Nigeria in contrast with the easy going of the people from Dubai. And it is also true that while I was in Pakistan I saw quite a lot of people questioning certain Islamic laws, but never Muhammad.

But hold on! How can these guys think they're entitled to demand our blind respect by a figure? Is it that now I cannot say whatever I feel about everything? Yes, because in Europe we have the right to say anything that comes to our minds: it's an undeniable right! At least in Europe. Untouchable. Exactly, untouchable like Muhammad.

Wait a minute, but if we have the right to have an untouchable thing, maybe they also have the right to one... Well, then lets make it that each one gets their precious thing, and let's not create any confusions: if they don't want to say bad things about the prophet, that's up to them, let them forbid it, but we will stay with our freedom of speech. We won't accept having them imposing us their jewel, once we're not tying to impose them ours.

Yeah, but... Maybe we are. Maybe we are doing it with all our attempts to make the Arab world a democratic copy of the western civilization.

Dammit, after all they're trying to have an untouchable jewel, but so are we; they want to impose us their jewel, but so do we!

Shit man, please explain me again who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, because the beer will not help me any more!

Bird flu

The first Nigerian signs in front of me...

His

This is Sammy.
This is his Sun Tan Beach.
It's his because it was on it that he was abandoned by mother and father.
It's his because it was on it that the neighbourhood collected him.
It's his because it's behind it that sits the house made out of sticks and palm leafs where he lives. It's his because he lets it teach him the few things he can learn without going to school.
It's his because it's from its palm tree that he collects the oil that he sells.
It's his because it's there where he spends his lazy Sundays.
It's his because he was the only person I found on the sand that day.

Exhausted amazement

So we left the factory compound. There had already been one week that we were in Nigeria, and this was the first time that we dared stepping outside.

We had settled it a long time before, once expeditions of this kind have to be prepared well in advance and very carefully: ask to a Nigerian colleague to exchange in the black market our dollars into the (as Paulo calls it) "Mickey Mouse currency" of this country; ask for a driver, since the streets of Lagos are just for masters; and ask for police escort. Our imagination also went far away when they mentioned "police escort", but on the morning of the adventure we were just entitled to an unarmed policeman: "Robbers? No, I'm just going with you to protect you from the police; don't worry because I have my contacts; they won't hassle you, I know them all".

We crossed the factory gate leaving behind the well painted and clean buildings, surrounded by hectares of properly cut and strong grass, spread over a landscape composed here and there by trees coloured with red flowers; leaving behind the pool surrounded by aligned bushes, the clean tennis court, the low guesthouses and the rooms illuminated by large windows that open over all the garden.

We crossed the factory gate to face the dusty road, split in half by rubbish, interposed by skinny and dirty people that between the two lanes scratch the abandoned packages, eats the rest of the leftovers, gives breast to their children and watches the infernal traffic go by. They have by now lost all hope to raise their begging hands. By the sides unstable wooden and metal stalls try to sell some raw meat spread on top of stones and covered with old empty cement bags, or packed products decoloured by the sun, deformed throughout time and infested by humidity. The driver speeds up, never stopping, not even by the numerous police patrols that hassle the locals: our escort is doing its job.

More or less intense, the landscape outside the car window doesn't seem to change throughout the long hour that we take to get to the town centre. Agustin, our driver, makes sometimes comments about the places we go through: it seems that he's proud for driving the white "sirs", masters of that skin colour that we cannot see on the streets. We haven't seen any white people in any of the areas we crossed. And yet we know that they exist in Lagos, but they hide behind the dark windows of their high luxury cars or behind the security of their houses covered in barbed wire. Agustin probably thought that like them we don't like to mingle with other colours and he suggested that we stopped at the new shopping centre in town, probably one of the few places where the faces are brighter, in an aseptic environment made by products that are more expensive here than they are in Europe.

We crossed several areas in town, but without ever leaving the car, so the security rules obliged. Outside the car semi-famine people would come close; Agustin told us not to take pictures. We still managed to stop at the city beach, where kids dived in contaminated waves, leper beggars collected old bills and someone shitted far away on the sand. Our arrival was followed by that of a group whose entirely white tunics obfuscated their dark skins. They were from a radical Christian religion that scratched with sea water the brain, source of all washable sins.

Back to the car we took a look at a stall that seemed to be selling some sort of food. From far, it seemed to be some too fried, too dried, too dirty kind of fish, but a closer look identified grilled meet.

From then onwards our amazement was already too tired to notice anything. It's maybe because of that exhausted amazement that the Europeans that live here have already forgotten about this reality. The last thing I felt before falling asleep in the comfort of the bumps on the road was the smoke from rubbish burning.

How better can this get?

"THE H5N1 avian influenza has been detected in Africa for the first time, the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) said here yesterday, reporting an outbreak among poultry in northern Nigeria that has killed 40 000 birds.

According to the latest official toll compiled by the World Health Organisation (WHO), there have been 165 recorded human cases of H5N1 infection [worldwide], 88 of them mortal."
The Herald online

Which other catastrophe can happen to this country? I accept all sorts of estimates, speculation, futurology and witchcraft of all kinds.

Nigerian charm

The travel guide classifies as highly risky any adventure with a photo camera outside the factory compound, and the company's policy prohibits almost all image transfer from the inside. I have not yet decided if I want to loose my life or my job, but in the meanwhile, I concluded that I had to work too hard to find a motif for a contemplative Sunday. I abandoned then the passive contemplation, deciding to follow my most recent friend.

He's always around, him and his brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, nephews, grandparents and girlfriends. Oh yes, girlfriends: I would say that this is the season for it, and we see him running wild after the poor females.

I caught him on the sensors while he looked killer at a female before the attack. What do you say about this look? How much charm is this one?

I need to find a name for my friend. Can anyone help me?

What to say about us?

It's Friday night and while I zap through TV channels, Paulo bites some humid soft chips. We're both under thirty, and this is the way we live this closure that we were put into. We try to keep frustration away with sips of mediocre Nigerian beer.

"Hey, let it in FashionTV", Paulo asked. I accepted, but after two minutes I protested: "Right, the girls are nice, but this is a bit boring", to what he answered "yeah, but the girls are nice".

Just five minutes after he was sleeping on the sofa. I went up the stairs and I let myself fall on the bed: the fatigue of a week passed in the mixing tower, assisted by the lack of permission to leave the compound, threw me into bed.

Up Nigeria

The man sitting next to me kept a serious and tense expression. He would barely move his face muscles, rarely close his eyebrows, and never, ever, move his eyes off of the TV screen.

I asked him for the score, and he answered me one null, like a machine and without moving his lips like a ventriloquist. My next question made all sense to me: "and who's winning?", but he almost got offended, just spiting "Nigeria is loosing". Such an answer almost made me loose all motivation and I seriously considered asking Paulo to go back to the office. After all, we had decided to take a break to see the match with the line operators so that we could establish, right from the first days, a close and equal relationship with them. We thought that the match could be a moment when they would be more relaxed and that they could for a moment forget about our condition of "coming from headquarters", thus creating with us an unconscious empathy. And us with them, once after all we'll be working together for the next five months, and we don't want to have to stand a bad working environment. But as we saw it at that stage, things weren't going according to our plans.

Paulo insisted more. He spoke to the fellow at his right about the Nigerian players he knew of, but the guy paid little attention. He turned his words to the left and tried to make analogies with Mexican football, but they didn't even blink. There were only fifteen minutes for the game to end, and Paulo suggested that we went back, and that we left those attempts to some other day. For some strange reason, and even going against my feeling of fatigue that was internally trying to get me out of there, I refused and I proposed that we stayed a bit longer.

Thirty seconds later, the right Nigerian player manages to penetrate de Senegalese defence and make the ball fly in front of the goal. The goal-keeper hits the ball away badly, placing it perfectly available to the Nigerian attacker, that couldn't do anything else than placing the ball inside the goal.

The man next to me jumped off of his chair and started screaming with all his strength, clapping hands and jumping out of explosive contentment. The others around us also got up as an infernal crowd, hugging each other and transforming the wooden tables into loud drums. Thirty seconds later, all instantaneously sat, returning back again to the impenetrable pose. We hadn't had time to react, and they were already closed again. Not even our "great goal, hein?" could get them back to relaxation. Paulo wanted once again to return, but now there was little time until the end and we could stand there for a bit more.

I was still talking to my colleague when I saw that the man by my side was standing again, this time performing a strange dance that I can only identify with the chicken kind. When I turned may eyes towards the TV screen I could just see the replay: the ball had again entered the Senegalese goal. The party required now double the energy, once it meant victory and not just a mere draw.

The game was over a few minutes afterwards, and the personnel retuned to the productions lines walking in an ordered line, and in a whispering silence, but this time without that tense expression of a few moments before. Now they were relaxed: they didn't have in their faces the stress of the game, they just carried the lightness of going to work. When turning around the corner, the whispering silence was broken: one of the operators screamed at us from far "up Nigeria". It was the sign of the empathy that we had been looking for. We screamed the same back.