ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Opinion category.

On Cycling

It is at times stressing, and definitely more exerting than driving a car. I have heard of the many advantages of riding over other means of transportation, and the best will have to be how it may help to protect the environment by reducing the amount of gas fumes in the atmosphere. And it’s healthy. With sufficient nutrition, the rider exercises his muscles and his mental alertness in a way that is not found in other vehicles like plane or car trips. The bike rider definitely lives in every second of the stretch, exercising his lungs as he takes in the breeze around his head. Besides this headache that I feel in my head as a result of yesterday’s daring long ride, I think I actually enjoy this new experience of cycling.

The bike trails in Edwardsville are some of the most advanced in this country, and they form a very beautiful network of tracks of tar for both runners and riders. Yesterday was my first long distance journey out of the campus by myself since the last time I’d made a similar effort about a week after I got my bike. That time, I didn’t go too far. I’d gone to the boundaries of the University, and returned when the signs began to read new names. But I had planned to return on another one of those trips whenever time permitted. The SIUE campus has been reputed to be one of the largest in the country in terms of land area, behind only a few other universities, so venturing out to the ends of the campus boundaries was something of a start. Yesterday however, I went out of campus – through a different route – into town for a visit.

But it was while returning, alone, at night that I had another one of my travula moments. I got to a traffic light that showed red, and I brought out my camera to immediately capture the contrast of the colours against the darkness of the night, only to hear some voices from inside a car on the road, also waiting for the lights to change, screaming in my direction.

“What are you doing?” Apparently they were concerned. For what, I had no idea.

My hand shook from the startling noise, and the camera moved. I had missed my target shot, and I looked back at them. From the distance, I couldn’t see who they were in the car or how many they were. There must have been at least one man, and a few other girls – most likely from the university, and most likely coming from a party. They sounded African-Americans, and the voices I heard were the girls’.

“I’m taking pictures,” I shouted back.

“What for?” I heard again.

“Why do you care?” I retorted, with a shrug. I just couldn’t understand their right to question my priceless appreciation of something of beauty even though, in my mind, I knew that their surprise must be one of these things:

1. That they’d never seen anyone on a bike at night.

2. They’d never seen anyone on a bike at night, taking pictures.

3. They’d never seen anyone on a bike at night, taking pictures of a traffic light!

They became quiet for a little while, and then the light changed. They must have then resolved the doubt within their murmurs, because I then heard: “Okay, have fun taking pictures,” and I said “Thank you” with a thumbs up gesture, before they went across the t-junction towards the university. In my surprise, I didn’t immediately move across the road myself, nor return to get another camera shot of the traffic lights, but later on the way home, I couldn’t immediately decide as well whether that was an awkward moment, or not.

PS: Today, I’m signing up for membership of bicycles-for-humanity.org and bikesfortheworld.com, two non-governmental organizations whose aim is to find unused bikes in North America, Europe and some other western countries and send them to spots in the world where they’re most needed, and where they might change someone’s life by providing an effective means of harmless transportation. Join them if you can. You might be helping someone, somewhere.

Ìyeyè

Nigerian Ìyeyè

A while ago in Ibadan Nigeria, before I began my Fulbright programme, I’d shared my fascination with the ìyeyè with friends on Facebook, and the response was enlightening. A few of them hadn’t seen it before nor enjoyed it’s delicious taste. I was discovering for the first time that the fruit which looked like a juicy berry that as little children we enjoyed picking up from under its tree as it falls down ripe during the summer was not as popular in all of Yorubaland as I had previously thought. There were some people who grew up in parts of the country without even ever having heard of it.

I’ve now developed a similar fascination in the United States when I discovered the fact that not as many people as I thought know what plantain is or what it tastes like. Interestingly, even Reham the Egyptian has displayed a similar kind of ignorance which is understandable when I put it in mind that Egypt is in Africa’s Sahara region, perhaps not a place conducive to growing such food crops. At the get-together we had at Rudy’s house on Tuesday for my birthday, we inevitably got around to discussing food, and I made another startling discovery that America has no such food as yam. What they called yam here is actually Irish potato, which I’ve had the pleasure of having as a good meal of potato salad.

American Red Grapes

Now grapes. It has been a good pleasure first to discover that one could buy and enjoy a bunch of red table grapes here for a far, far less amount than one pays for it back home. The first (and inevitably last) time that I asked how much a bunch of grapes cost in Lagos Nigeria, I believe it was between $10 and $40, which is only understandable when I know that we neither plant nor “produce” it there. They are imported. And secondly that no matter how hard I try to shake the thought, I can’t but conclude that the American grapes are a sort of distant family to my Nigerian ìyeyè even though they taste a little differently, and the ìyeyè has a seed in its core which the grapes don’t. They look much alike, and they both are berries with a juicy inside and a soft covering. I don’t know much of Agriculture, but I won’t bet against the fact of this similarity. Help anyone?

Eid El-What?

Unlike my Nigerian folks, I did not have any holidays on Monday and Tuesday to celebrate the end of the Moslem fast. If I was back home in Nigeria, I’d be home resting on Monday while I ran late trying to meet up with a class. Reham the Egyptian celebrated her Eid festival in the quiet of her flat while all her folks at home stayed back from work to rest and feast. In Nigeria, there is a public holiday for every religious holiday from Christmas, Easter to the two Moslem Eid festivals in the year. On a curios but worrying note, there is no public holiday (yet) for any African traditional religion!

Playing games on a work-free day There are no Eid holidays in the United States for obvious reasons: it is regarded more as a Christian state when it’s not being seen as secular. The actual reason is that there are too many holidays every year in the country, and none of them have to do with religion. That’s what I think at least, because Christmas is all about the festival, the movies and Santa Claus, and less of the birth of Jesus Christ. No one knew when Jesus was born precisely anyway. The December 25 date was only arbitrarily picked by one dead pope to signify a day of the year for followers to remember. Neither is Thanksgiving any more than a celebration of life, health and family. The formerly large purpose of gathering to praise God for a bountiful harvest must have been overtaken by the fact of growing skepticism in religion and belief in God, and the decline of subsistence or commercial farming based solely on the variables of nature. Science has ultimately come to the rescue, and I have a feeling that the God of thanksgiving may not be as large a guest at the dinner table as he used to be.

Now, let me say here that I haven’t had my first Thanksgiving in the US, and I’m looking forward to it, especially the holiday it provides. The above thoughts are merely random, perhaps reflective of the state of belief, religion and God in today’s America. Ben, my flatmate, doesn’t know whether an afterlife exists, nor does he put much thought to its existence, or that of God, because to him, it will be worse if one does good only because of a selfish desire to be accepted in the afterlife than a genuine willingness to help other people. I find this reasonable.

In my country Nigeria on Monday and Tuesday, there were days of rest from work. I like to see it as a much deserved holiday for the hardworking citizens, and not just a sacrifice to some God after a thirty days ritual of fasting. But if it makes people happier to believe it to be just so, I possess no right to deny them the privilege. When Christmas comes in December, there will also be a holiday season for the Nigerian Christians to have their own moments of feasting and sharing, which is another component of religious holidays in Nigeria. Will America learn anything from the demarcation of holiday days for religious breaks in Nigeria? I doubt it. I seriously doubt also that it ever needs to. If permitted in America, every known and registered religion will sue for its own holidays and there’d be no days left to work. Let us do with Martin Luther King Holidays, Halloween fun shows, July 4th holiday, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Labour day, and a few other distinctly American holidays, and we can all go our ways. Problem is, once in a while, a yet unadapted foreigner from a multi religious country like Nigeria will show up in America, and come late to class on a normal American Monday, thinking all the while that because his folks at home are on break, he should also be too.

The Fourth Class

When I was in Kenya in 2005, I remember that one of the most recurrent observations I received from Kenyans was that Nigeria is a place filled with people who believe in witchcraft and practice it in their daily lives. We all believed in juju, they said, and none of the women I spoke to would dare to marry a Yoruba person for fear of one day having to deal with a mother-in-law that could turn them into a piece of metal at the slightest provocation. I have since discovered that this is a very prevalent perception of Nigeria, mostly obtained through our home videos that have been ranked third in the world in terms of output. Is there practice of witchcraft and a prevalent belief in it in Yoruba land today. The answer is yes. Does everyone believe in it. Erm, I would say yes to this as well, but with very few exceptions of the skeptics.

Cut to my fourth class, where I had asked my students to read a short story titled “Why Atide Is Taking To A Coin”, written by a German friend, student of Yoruba and a current PhD student at SOAS. I first read the short story in 2004 while it was still being written, and I got to contribute a few ideas to its storyline. So last week, when I asked my students to list ten things they found strange, new or memorable about the Yoruba culture from the story, and five things that they found similar to their own culture, I was trying to get them more interested in reading and discovering new things. It was also a way for me to get into their minds and see what they see when they look at me through the prism of Yoruba culture. The result amazed me. Of all the answers given to the first question, one was common to all the ten students in the class: They were surprised that a belief in witchcraft still exists/persists in some cultures of the world, particularly mine. They couldn’t understand why people ascribed occurences they couldn’t explain to the evil forces in their family, and they couldn’t understand why somebody who is Christian/Moslem would go to a Babalawo to get help with something that was bothering them. A Class homework

Now, I could have easily said that it was the fault of the writer of the story for painting the Yoruba people in such a light, but when I look around Yorubaland today, I find not one but many leaders and public figures who would take their supporters or followers to shrines so as to get them to swear and take oaths of allegiance. Recently there was a case of a prominent state governor, and a lawmaker whose naked picture was taken at a shrine where he had gone to perform rituals. The fact is, belief in rituals are still as strong today in Yorubaland as it was before the British came. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is beyond my scope to say, but it took me some time of readjustment to deal with the truth, being a little lost to the effect such disclosures might have on the impressionable minds of my brilliant students, and their ability to see this somehow as a positive attribute of such a people with a complex culture and outlook on life.

Are we a modern society in Yorubaland, or are we still attached to the deep vestiges of the past? If the texts of our literature, the lines of our poems and the plots of our dramas are anything to go by, the answer might be far from what we always like to believe.

Yesterday…

…I drove to St. Louis.

140920091271

I will save the details of the journey for my memoirs, but I can tell you that it is (one of) my most memorable experience so far in the United States, one that I will not forget in a hurry – except I lose my mind, of course. Thinking about that, no pun intended, maybe I should insure my memory. Now, the vehicle that I drove was an automatic with a very sound engine. I always preferred the shift gear vehicles, but I can’t complain when someone offers me a car to drive for free, and it turns out to be automatic. I have noticed that many cars in America are automatic, even the trucks and trailers. The passenger was female – a painter, and the road was clear because it was night. We set off at around 11pm to the Emergency Room at a certain “Barnes Jewish” Hospital, and we returned around 4am, tired and exhausted. I’ve never felt so alive, plying the many veins that make up the American road network.

Well, let me be a little less cryptic. The female passenger was my friend the artist, and she had broken her ankle earlier in the day while descending a flight of stairs. She twisted her ankle, tripped and fell on her back. I didn’t know how serious it was until she drove into campus and I saw it, all swollen and sore. It surely was an emergency. How she managed to drive to me, I had no idea. When I asked why she could not go to a nearby government hospital, she told me that the healthcare system of the US does not allow her adequate healthcare in a government hospital without having to pay more than she cold afford. A simple visit to the hospital for an x-ray scan might cost up to $1500 in bills. I couldn’t believe my ears. This piece of information only brought home the realitites of the national healthcare reform debate that has rocked American politics for a while now. In Nigeria, you could get a scan for $5 at any standard laboratory, and the government hospital will treat a patient immediately for any emergencies. And one doesn’t need a health insurance. America has the costliest healthcare system in the developed world, it seems. According to Holly Ruff, this is a country where people actually declare bankruptcy after recovering from a major illness, even when they have insurance.

“Barnes Jewish” is a charitable but well equipped hospital in St. Louis which sometimes allows its patients to pay according to their own plan, or not at all, depending on the state of their finances – according to what I hear. The foot was scanned, and the doctor found that my friend had only sprained her ankle, and would need to stay at home for a few more days. The leg was stablized, bandaged and braced, and we headed home. It was my first time of carrying my international driver’s license on me after the wine debacle, and it turned out to be a very good decision.

140920091274 Healthcare is important to everyone, and no one, no one should have to die because they’re poor,, and no one should have to go broke because they fall sick. A society with as many rich citizens like America should be able to take care of it’s poor. This is not Obama’s policy. It is only common sense. The same goes for Nigeria. As I sat in the lobby waiting for Holly to emerge from the emergency room where she was being attended to, I began to think about the number of people who were rushed into the emergency room while I was there. I thought about all the sick people I know, and how much they already suffer, without worrying about having money to pay for it. I have a close family member diagnosed with cancer, and my heart goes out to her. A close friend of mine that I last saw in about 2008 in good health has now been diagnosed with a bone disease. He’s also sickle celler. One of the families here that has been very nice to me has a cancer patient in it. Patrick Swayze, the actor famous for his role in Point Break and Ghost has been announced dead after a long struggle with cancer. Just a few days ago, we had mourned the passing of Senator Edward Kennedy of the USA, and Gani Fawehinmi of Nigeria, both favourite public figures whose lives were cut short by old age, and a terminal disease. It is a world filled with sickness that we live in. We should not make it worse by restricting care and support to only the ones that can pay for it. Helping the weak and taking care of the sick may just be the most noblest act we could perform as conscious human beings, or the sanest reason of our existence.

This post is dedicated to healthcare reform, in the United States where it’s long overdue, and in my country still in need of much more infrastructural and human capital development.

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