Life in Nigeria! Quite an adventure, and quite a challenge!
Of all the challenges: language, food, the heat, the greatest came last year when I was invited to establish a school for Fulani children in Kogi state.
It all began with a can of paint, in the little town of Ekparakwa, and a meeting ordained by God.
I had been working in the southern state of Akwa Ibom, among the mostly Christian, Ibibio tribe, but was drawn to the Fulani people I occasionally saw along the roadsides and in the fields with their cows. On asking, I discovered that these beautiful, stately people were nomads from the North – cattle rearers who follow seasonal routes through West Africa looking for the best pastures and water sources for their cows.
They are an isolated tribe, speaking a different language, living in the bush with their animals, despised by many, though they are the beef producers of the nation. They have constant run-ins with farmers over the land. Because they carry weapons they are feared; in a mostly Christian state, because they are Muslims, they are carefully avoided.
It is because of this fear and prejudice that many Fulani children do not go to school!
Many Fulani kids, from the age of 4, are expected to herd their fathers’ cows and sheep, and spend their lives, isolated and illiterate as their fathers and grandfathers before them, shepherding the flocks, following the cows.
Well, I was in the town of Ekparakwa one day, buying a can of paint, when two young Fulani girls entered the shop and asked for some of the empty paint cans that were stacked by the door. The shop keeper rudely chased them away. I followed them and using sign language and broken English, I greeted them and invited myself to drive them back to their camp!
There began an incredible friendship with the head of the clan, whom I’ll call ‘Chief’, an unusually wise and enlightened Fulani chief, his brothers, their wives and children. There were long visits in their camp, tours of their herds, lessons in cooking traditional dishes and making ‘no-no’ - a home-made buttermilk, which I soon discovered was a big ‘NO NO’ for me, and field trips for their children to our school there in the south, Hope Academy.