Home Away from Home with Abi Adeboyejo
Email: abi.adeboyejo@yahoo.com Twitter: @abihafh
I took the kids out on a train ride last weekend when I was in London. The weather was beautiful and we decided to get on a train to Liverpool Street Station from Romford in Essex, just so they could have an outing and eat MacDonald’s on the way back. I know many people reading this are aware that quite a sizeable number of our fellow Nigerians live in the London area and I have on many occasions bumped into old acquaintances while waiting for trains or out shopping in Upton Park for ‘correct’ oxtail, tripe and beef. This train trip, as I said, was to entertain the children but it turned out that I was the one who got entertained.
On the platform at Romford train station the three of us stood, myself and my two kids, looking like the out-of-town country folk that we were. Birmingham where we live is nowhere as wild as London. It is like comparing Abeokuta with Lagos. We were used to a more sedate pace of life and after we spent 10 minutes convincing a drunk-looking ticket attendant that the kids were entitled to free travel I started to lose interest in the whole outing. We waited patiently on the platform while very fast trains wheezed by. After about 15 minutes, a nice looking middle aged black lady came up the platform and stood beside us. After exchanging smiles and a nod, I whispered loudly in Yoruba to my daughter to stop putting her hair in her mouth. The woman heard me and she turned to me and told me in Yoruba that the trains were forever late at this station. She had a very loud voice and I answered that we were only visiting and didn’t know of this.
Forty minutes later, we were on the train to Liverpool Street and this woman was still berating the train service and all that had to do with it. She swore that the seats in the train were the dirtiest in London and that the train drivers were prone to stopping the train abruptly, causing one to feel some sort of motion-sickness. I just smiled politely and tried to look away but she wouldn’t stop. I was getting angry because I saw that we were going past all the sights I had planned to show the children. I just couldn’t get a word in edge-wise because of this woman and her alternative tour reporting. When we finally got to Liverpool Street, she informed me she was going to the African clothes shops on the street and wanted to know where we were going. I quickly lied and said we were on our way to Woolwich and pinched my son in the back when he started to say we were only going to the MacDonald’s inside the beautiful Liverpool Street station.
Later that evening I called one of my cousins to find out how her daughter was doing. She had a bad virus (or bug, as we call it) and was sent home from school the day before. My cousin had also caught the bug and sounded hoarse but she managed to tell me how angry she was that her GP had refused to give her daughter any medication but said the bug would clear itself. She said she was going to make complaint because they waited a long time before she was seen by the doctor and he had the audacity to tell her she was worrying too much.
I often find myself moaning about my children’s school dinners. I complained to their teacher only last week that the kids said that whenever they had chips, it was always cold and soggy. And whenever I go shopping I am always highly critical of everything, especially vegetables and always discard any with the slightest spot or blemish on them, especially poor bananas. ( I used to love blemished bananas!)
Appreciation
The thought has occurred to me that I am losing my sense of appreciation: that recognition of the quality, value, significance and magnitude of people and things.
I remember the days when I was at Law School in Abuja. Getting a bus ticket to Lagos was only a tenth of the journey. There was so much trepidation about the journey itself, especially if it was a night journey, that I would embark on a day’s prayer and fasting (to ask God to deal with raiders of vulnerable passengers and damsels) before I took the journey. The reception I got when I arrived home could be likened to what Lord Lugard must have received when he returned to England after his expedition to the jungles of Africa! Talk about walking through the valley of shadow of death. I appreciated the bus, the driver, and the opportunity to journey in safety and the luxury of watching the same Igbo subtitled movie for 12 hours non stop.
When did I pick up this very British habit of moaning all the time? And it is not just me, the lady at the train station and my cousin seem to confirm my fear that many Nigerians living abroad have started to lose their sense of appreciation. We complain about everything just like our British counterparts. It almost seems a taboo to show appreciation for anything especially the effort that goes into running public services. It is always ‘normal’ to criticise everything, even when we know (better than anyone) that things could be worse.
The woman at Romford said the train was always late. How many train journeys did she take in Nigeria relative safety in the last 20 years? I know things have changed a bit now, but my memories of trains when I was growing up in Lagos were the very odd ones that use to snake past those ‘bend-down guys’ around the old Yaba market, by the bus stop. They never stopped (both the train and the bend down guys!). People just flung themselves on or off trains while others hung on parts of the coaches like koala bears looking for leaves. Shocking! Yet, those people appreciated the ability to make train journeys. They appreciated the gift of agility that made it possible to jump on and off trains and the opportunity to sometimes sell their wares.
I must admit that I resent not being able to see things through un- jaded eyes. I miss the calmness that follows being appreciative of every little thing that happens on a daily basis. Perhaps because everything runs like clockwork in the UK, I have started to get to that comfort zone where I forget that things could be a lot worse. To this end I salute the spirit of appreciation that subsists in the average Nigerian. It is not a spirit of ‘suffering and smiling’ but that of thankfulness. Coupled with being appreciative is undying faith that things will get better. Without sounding patronising, it is by far better to look towards a better future than to stand in one place and keep complaining about what you’ve got. Our spirit of appreciation and faith is what keeps us alive and happy as a people. Yes, a magnitude of things still need to be improved in Nigeria but let’s continue to be appreciative of the small things while we wait for the miracle of deliverance and development.
