In the mid 1970s, I spent a year working as a lecturer at the Federal Advanced Teachers’ College in Okene, Nigeria. I say “working”, but in fact the College had not actually been built due to a significant dispute about land. Despite this, some students and a substantial complement of staff had been recruited from Nigeria, the UK and a number of other countries The college was temporarily housed in what had previously been an army barracks. I posted about this experience on this blog some time ago – see The Yellow Typewriter.
My abiding memory of that year is frustration – closely followed by heat, heat, heat and a fairly significant lack of water. The staff and students involved were also larger than life – but that is another story.
If you look at a map, you will discover Okene to be situated approximately 40 miles east of the confluence of the Niger and Benue rivers. It is in Kwara state, which due to its position in the centre of Nigeria “benefits” from a mix of the enervating humidity of the south and the intense heat of the north. The net effect of this is that day to day in the dry season (roughly October to March) there is hardly any rain but plenty of humidity, and even in the wet season (roughly May to September) the rain is heavy but only intermittent and the air is intensely humid. Day after day in the dry season we would pray for rain and watch as promising thunderclouds built up or rolled past like black smoke over nearby hills. Only rarely did they cool things down with refreshing rain. I have never since taken for granted a supply of clean water.
While admittedly on a different scale, I have been reminded of those days in recent weeks, as here on Deeside, and specifically in Aboyne, we have had day after day of hot weather and our garden has become baked dry. In the afternoons, dramatic cumulus clouds have built up, promising storms, only to disperse and vanish. As I type this, there is not a cloud in the sky, our dog lies panting on his bed and it is too hot (at least for a fair-skinned Scot) to sit out for long in the sun.
It is all relative, of course. Last week, I was in Edinburgh for a Stroke Association meeting, where, thanks to the fine weather, I was sufficiently encouraged to walk from my budget hotel to the Stroke Association office. As followers of this blog will know from a previous post, this was always going to be something of a challenge. My legs had scarcely recovered by the next day, when we had a family reunion in Edinburgh with the visiting American kin, including Cambria. If that statement makes no particular sense to you, then I encourage you to read an earlier post on this blog, The Wicker Basket . For these kin from the USA, our Scottish “heat” was, of course, nothing special.
Try telling that to the spaced out, panting whippet lying next to me.