Cold is a far greater threat to survival than it appears. It decreases your ability to think and weakens your will to do anything except to get warm. Cold is an insidious enemy; as it numbs the mind and body, it subdues the will to survive. Cold makes it very easy to forget your ultimate goal–to survive. - http://www.firstaidneeds.com/survivalch15pg38
It is seventeen degrees celcius here in Edwardsville, and my room mate has the fan on. Like him, I’m also not wearing a shirt as I lay on the bed, but only because somehow I am still able to cope with this weather. In his own case, it is because he feels hot. “Are you kidding me? You feel hot in this temperature?” I asked in part amazement and part dread. “No,” he responded, “this is not cold at all. Cold begins in November.”
I’ve had this conversation a lot of times since I arrived here, and all of them usually ends with a warning that I should be both mentally and physically prepared to endure three gruelling months of subzero cold, I mean below zero degrees! My physical preparation must have to do with fleshening up by eating as much fat foods as possible. The second is buying all appropriate clothings. Just today, I bought a thick woolen jacket at a strip mall in town. They didn’t have any gloves, hats, mufflers and boots for me or I would have bought those too. In any case, I still have a few more weeks more before it becomes impossible to go out in a simple jeans and t-shirt. With fattening up, I seem to have little problem, thanks to cheese burgers and cheese pizzas. But then, the conversations eventually gets scarier when people start to describe what it is really like to be in a temperature at freezing point.
I am a warm-blooded animal and I have never lived in anywhere below 12degrees, and that is why it gets scary. Maybe I’ll just pack my bags and flee to Ibadan when it gets to a point when hot coffee and aboniki rub fail to lift my spirit and I can’t take it anymore. I think about it for a while and then change my mind. Maybe it’s not so bad. And then I look into the freezer and think about what it must be like to sleep in one of those. I am optimistic, but I still don’t know what I’ll do when December comes, then January, and the coldest one of them, February. Whatever shall I do? How would I survive?
I remember Providence again today because I remember home. We do not have as much a problem with gender in Nigeria today as we do with tranparency, order and discipline. I remembered walking through the legislative chambers of the Rhode Island Senators, and noticing that instead of the antiquated show of hands or a rabble-rousing ayes and nays when voting on a point, the Senators there all had a monitor and little coloured bottons on their seats which they press, corresponding with their choice of vote. In just a few seconds, as soon as everyone has cast their votes by pressing either “aye”, “nay” or “abstain”, all the votes are tallied and shown on a large electronic board, and each person’s vote shown clearly against their name. In the Nigerian Legislative houses today, it is usually a long tortuous session (sometimes involving fisticuffs) to decide whether the “ayes” or the “nays” have it, all in spite of the fact that every Friday evening, the whole country tunes in to watch the “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” game show where the simple technology of electronic voting and collation is shown to be not such a big deal. Talk about priorities.
