HOME AWAY FROM HOME

HOME AWAY FROM HOME
Excerpts from my Nigerian Diary

SKYLINE HOTEL is not a very old three-story building with eighteen rooms. It stands aloft along Ikurudo Road, which is a noisy combination of España and Epipanio de los Santos Avenue. But it is home to us ten doctors for here we can cook Filipino foods. We have common kitchen, common dining room, common receiving room but not necessarily common sense. Two doctors stay in one room which is not carpeted but air-conditioned and furnished with refrigerator.

The Hotel is one half –hour drive from Massy Street Children’s Hospital where I am working. Like most poorly cared hospital for children in any part of the world, Massy is messy, noisy and fishy most of the time. It is located in a place which I can only eloquently describe as a confusing concoction of Tondo, Divisoria and Central Market , doubly odoriferous and doubly dangerous. In between MSCH and Skyline Hotel is a cross section of Lagos City, the Federal Capital of Nigeria and the center of all activities where everybody flocks: foreign officials and dignitaries, traders, contract workers, travelers and charlatans as well.

Life here in Lagos is not easy to describe. It is like an abstract painting, the more you contemplate on it the more you get confused. Lagos is a vibrant Metropolis with all the extravagances of a modern city but suffocating and very expensive. Reconstruction and development is going on in full blast. Highways and bridges are long and modern, merging of course with risky and antiquated streets. Drivers are restless and reckless. They drive left and right, right and left towards any open space. There are no traffic lights and seemingly no traffic rules as there were also no traffic policemen. There are many modern commercial centers in many places standing side by side with hundreds of small trade stands selling everything; market at every corner, vendors all around . In between them are files of garbage and junks.

If you are willing and ready to look there are a lot more to see for this is a city of sight, sound and smell. You can see people defecating along main thoroughfares, hear sounds of all tones and intensities for here people talk aloud and shout even louder (and they pray with loudspeakers), smell pleasant odors occasionally and not very pleasant ones most of the time.

The people are bizarre as the place but very colorful. From their skin, which ranges from unsatisfactory light black to cloudy medium black to striking dark black to their native costume, which is truly magnificent. Their intricate hairdos are something for the eyes to behold and when they cover their heads they wear the most expensive, long pieces of cloth to wrap around their heads in a more intricately artistic fashion, not one is ever similar to the other. Men use various types of hats. Many of the ladies’ breasts are dangling like their earrings which most of the time are matched with unique golden pendants and thick bracelets. This probably is a compensatory mechanism to cover their color or whatever. You will wonder if they are aware of dirt as they hold parties on garbage disposal areas without being scandalized by the smell of the filth

They are happy people and this they show in many ways: when a baby is born or when an old man dies and during all the important events that occur between the womb and the tomb.

Here in Lagos you bump shoulders with the good, the bad and the ugly. The good is usually very good, intelligent and dignified; the bad is generally worse, slow-foot, dash-conscious and dangerous; but the ugly is also beautiful for underneath his skin is a human being whose heart throbs with love, whose mind craves for understanding and whose soul also deserves eternity.

Under contract, I am scheduled to stay here for three years. I don’t know what is in store for me and I feel it is premature to make conclusive remarks. There are advantages and disadvantages, good and bad points, bright and dark sides as well as positive and negative aspects. It all depends so much on ones attitude towards it and from what angle one is actually and honestly viewing it.

Me, I am enjoying every bit of my stay here for I always think positively. I always look at the brighter and beautiful side and if it is necessary that I should look at the dark and ugly side, I just close my eyes and think of the rainbow and the legendary pot of gold at its end. At present I am just beginning to climb the nearer end of the rainbow with the fervent hope that I’ll be able to make it to the further end where the legendary pot of gold is supposedly buried. I hope to come back home with it. I know it will not be so long, after all what is three years deducted from a lifetime? For three years I don’t mind having Lagos as MY HOME AWAY FROM HOME. (October 29, 1978).

NOTE: When my father died on February 21, 1979 I applied for Emergency Leave but when I saw my children, the youngest was only one year old and the oldest only in grade four I decided not to return so I filed my resignation. I realized how my children needed me most in this period of their growth. My short stay in Nigeria was fruitful because of the experience that changed my attitude in life as a father and as a husband.