WaterAid Nigeria Update: Week 6
In 2007, Zak Kostura traveled to Nigeria with WaterAid to support their work delivering water, sanitation and hygiene education to rural communities. Each week, Zak wrote back to those following his travels with an update from the field. This is one of 12 he filed.
Zak Kostura | 15 October 2007
The van ahead of us cast up a mighty cloud of dust as it tore through the dry silt of the bush under the brutal midday sun. Our driver, Thomas, was in hot pursuit of the vehicle ahead. Eager to stay on its tail, Thomas carved out turns at full speed, sending the backside of our white station wagon whipping over to the broad side of the curve like a limp appendage. Against my better judgment I was halfway out the rear window of the passenger side, trying to catch a decent photograph of our race despite all the dust. Through the gritty cloud I could make out the glimmering features of other cars headed in all directions, their sunlit rooftops eking out above the tall grasses that surrounded us.
We had been on the road from Makurdi for three hours, heading more than 400 miles west to the cities of Ife and Oshogbo in Osun state. It was Sallah, the end of Ramadan, and we were on break for four days. In the final hours before the holiday began on Wednesday night, I and a few others from the office decided to make the trek to Ife. According to Yoruba myth, the world was created there by a descendant from the gods in heaven using a palm nut, some sand, and a chicken. We were also determined to explore the Osun Sacred Forest, where Suzanne Wenger, an Austrian artist, has spent decades rebuilding ancient shrines using wood and concrete.
But a massive traffic snarl near the bank of the Niger River had cut our progress abruptly; we learned quickly that a van up ahead had tipped while trying to negotiate a rather large crater in the middle of the road. Such features were common on Nigerian highways, as were the events that followed. Drivers headed in our direction flooded the adjacent lane for opposing traffic, rendering the road impassable. We could only infer that drivers on the other side of the tipped van had done the same. There was nowhere to go.
Suddenly, traffic to our left began moving along the narrow shoulder of the highway. Thomas threaded our car through the stalled traffic in the opposing lane and darted into place with the moving vehicles behind a white van that read “Peace Mass Transit” on the back. In no time we were moving fast, and as we advanced we could see that the leaders of this elite pack had driven off into the bush to the left. The revelation of this off-road bypass opened up like a fissure in the impromptu parking lot, and any car with immediate access to the mouth of the detour made a break for it. Before long, we found ourselves in the bush, desperately pursuing Peace Mass Transit, hoping that they knew the way out of the arid, sub-Saharan maze.
But the mad dash ended as abruptly as it began, when a brief pause by the driver of the van ahead left us motionless in a patch of silt that simply gave way as the front tires spun. Before long our car had bottomed out, and we were stuck in the bush. In a flash our leading vehicle vanished into the dust up ahead; we were no longer part of their peaceful mass.
Our salvation came in the form of five young kids, each clutching a handful of small change and dripping with sweat. Clearly they had turned similar misfortune into a booming racket. Like a veteran pit crew, they set to work on the stranded car. They gathered grass and leaves, sticks and bark, and packed the ditch with these fragments of nearby vegetation. Thomas hit the gas. The tires squealed and spun, and the bark began to burn. The blades of dry grass began to smolder. Thomas’ second-hand Japanese import was near to becoming a Pontiac Bonfire.
Without warning, the car lurched backward. The hood of the car lifted up out of the smoldering ditch like a horse rising on its hind legs. With all the determination of a stunt man, Thomas threw the car into drive and plowed out of the ditch toward relatively firm ground. The kids, who had been at the front, dove in all directions as Thomas made his move.
Victorious, the five able-bodied youngsters rose from the ground, dusted themselves off, and strutted up to the dislodged car. Needing no formal instruction, they stood against the side of the car, posing for a compulsory photo op. We dropped fifty naira in each pair of hands. The kids, impressed with their compensation, tore out on foot in front of the car, eager to show us the way back to the highway. We passed other cars in similar quagmires, and the precocious youths peeled off one by one to assist until only one remained with us. Before long, he pointed toward an opening in the dense bush, and with the other hand waved goodbye. As suddenly as it had all begun, we emerged back on the highway at the far end of the pile-up. We were back on our way.
The rest of our trip to Osun State was fine; we saw surreal hyper-modernist buildings on the campus of Obafemi Awolowo University and nearly a million bats in the sky all at once. We had our fortunes read by Ifa Diviners, and washed ourselves in the reputedly healing waters of the Osun River. I burned through rolls of film on Suzanne Wenger’s mammoth shrines and gawked at the monkey heads in the juju section of the local market in Oshogbo. Despite all of this, our Sallah holiday really came down to our adventures in the bush. It reinforced an old but apt cliché that purports that it’s all about the journey and not the destination. And that’s probably a good thing, since there’s way more traffic waiting along the way than there is at the end.
Zak Kostura is an Associate at Arup, an engineering firm that partners with WaterAid. Zak is running the 2019 NYC Half to raise funds for WaterAid's work. If you'd like to support this effort, please visit his page here: