The bright lights of Katsina

I've now been in Nigeria for a few weeks, and it's still taking some getting used to. I'm based in Katsina, a town in the far north of the country, about 30k from the border with Niger.

I spent a few days in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, a couple of weeks ago, for my induction into Save the Children, for whom I'm volunteering in Katsina. Abuja is a strange place. It is a purpose-built capital created in the 1980s in a religiously and ethnically 'neutral' part of the country and, as my boss put it, 'it's not built for mortals', but rather the international governing classes. Criss-crossed by enormous expressways and very expensive, it's not ideal for the budget-conscious visitor on foot (me) and unless you know the city it's hard to find things to do. Luckily the World Cup was just kicking off so I was able to watch a few games, including Nigeria v Argentina.

I'm slowly learning to speak Nigerian. I'm not talking about Hausa, which is the local language (and is itself proving a challenge), but rather Nigerian English, which has a rhythm, syntax and vocabulary all of its own. Verbs are proving a particular challenge: 'pick' means 'pick up', 'on' and 'off' are verbs, 'to fill' means 'to fill in', i.e. 'update'. Combined with strong accents, this means I often find Nigerian English harder to understand than, for example, Malian French!

I'm now back in Katsina, where I'll be based until I come home in early August. Katsina is an odd place, perfectly friendly but with very little to do. It's hardly tiny (it's a state capital, with a population of over 300,000) but conservative Islam and sharia law don't make for a party town.

The work with Save the Children is definitely teaching me a lot about development work. We're not in the implementation phase yet, but rather in the process of setting up a nutrition project (a pilot really) that will work in a couple of districts in the state. Dealing with organisational dysfunction across the board really slows things down, and this project is supposed to be done largely through the Katsina Ministry of Health which doesn't make it easier. People skip meetings, produce outrageously padded budgets and don't keep to commitments. Yet the project is moving forward and it will make a difference - malnutrition is a really serious problem in this part of the country, despite the oil money that continues to pour in to Abuja.