First Week of Travel

My first week of travel is over. It is cheaper to fly out of Dulles International Airport to Nigeria than it is to fly from Minneapolis. I have three tickets. First one on Sun Country Airlines to Reagan International in DC. Then a round trip to Abuja, Nigeria from Dulles International on British Airways. My return home to Minnesota is out of Baltimore on Delta Airlines. This saves me about $200 and I get to stop in and visit my grandkids. One minor problem with this trip. The Abuja airport is scheduled to close on the day I am scheduled to return. They are repairing the runway. British Airways says they will contact me if the project goes ahead and will work to get me on a different flight either earlier or out of Lagos. I am hoping that the project gets delayed.

I left Minnesota on Friday February 10th to Washington, DC where my son is stationed in the Navy. He picked me up a Reagan International and we drove to his home in Hyattsville, Maryland. There I visited my son Corey, his wife Caroline and my two grandkids. Sydney will turn 4 next month. When I return in March we will have a Birthday party and Logan's baptism. Sydney is in Pre-kindergarten at a day school in the same complex where my son works.

 They bought Valentine Cards to share at day school on Tuesday. The cards convert to masks. The girls got kittens or puppies and the boys got T-Rexs.


Logan turned 6 months on Friday. He can sit by himself for a while, then plops back on his back. He is trying to roll over and has it about 90 percent.  Usually, just as Granddad gets the phone out to take the picture of him sitting up. He only face planted forward once, while I was there,  trying to reach for something to stick into his mouth. He also goes to day school on the days his mom works.


Saturday Morning we walked to leave Sydney at her dance class and went for morning coffee at Vigilante Coffee.

I got to babysit for the Grandkid on Saturday night so Corey and Caroline could have a night out. Sydney and I played with Legos and Logan just chewed on them. On Monday I got Logan for an hour in the morning while Caroline went to the a kickboxing class. In the afternoon Logan had his 6 month check-up. He was real good until the nurse returned to the room with the needle. He either read her face or he remember the last immunization.

Monday evening we went to a Chez Dior Senegalese Restaurant in Hyattsville. We were early and their only customers.  I did not take any pictures of the main courses. We got a good variety of foods. Fish, chicken, various vegetables, fried plantains, couscous and rice. It was all good. They served the hot sauce on the side. The red sauce was a roasted habanero pepper paste. Hot, Hot. Senegal was a French Colony their food has french influence and a spicy African kick. We ordered two desserts one was a brownie with ice cream the owner gave us an extra big piece with two scoops of ice cream. The other was Senegalese dessert.  a sweet vanilla custard with couscous in it. Both were good. It was a mid range price. The owner told us that he is packed on Fridays and the weekend.

Tuesday everyone was at work or at day schools. I got to chill and work on some genealogy. In the evening, Corey drove me to the Prince George Metro Station. I took the Metro light rail to downtown DC transferred from the Yellow Line to downtown DC and transferred to the Orange Line to Rosslyn, Virginia station. There I was able to by my Senior Rail Pass. From now on I get 1/2 price rides There are some advantages to being 65.

The Rosslynn station had a Metro Bus terminal only about 200 feet from Metro Station.  I took the 5A express bus to Dulles Airport. Total trip from Corey's house to Dulles was less than 2 hours. Including a twenty minute wait for the bus at Rosslyn. I could have taken the silver line out to the Hendron Metro Station and caught the same bus. The cost would have been the same but a longer walk outside from the train station to the bus station. I got through check-in and security in about 20 minutes and had almost two hours left before my overnight flight to London, Heathrow.

Heathrow does not announce your gate until an hour before departure. So I had about 9 hours in one of the waiting lounges in Terminal 5. The vertical white lights are where you can plug in your chargers or laptops. I connected to their free wi-fi and worked on some genealogy most of Wednesday. Left Heathrow about 11 PM for an overnight flight to Abuja.  We landed at 6 AM. I walked over to the adjacent domestic flight area of the terminal and bought a ticket to Yola.  The flight was delayed as the pilot waited for the weather to clear in Yola. The Harmattan was light with almost a mile of visibility so we were able to fly in Thursday morning. On Friday the visibility was down to under a 1/2 mile all day.  Today, Saturday it better. I can see the tall phone towers that are about a mile from the house and there is enough light to have distinct shadows and I put my solar cell for my table lamp out to charge.

Thursday afternoon and evening I unpacked, set up the bedroom, bed net, and bought food for the kitchen. I brought with me 4 scub sink faucets. For those who have not seen my previous blogs the house I stay in is on the LCCN Jimeta Mission Compound and is the former home for Danish Missionaries. It is currently used as the Jimeta office for the LCCN Health Services Board staff and the LCCN Projects Officer. I use one of the two back bedrooms as my office. The other is storage. It has a nice little kitchen with a gas stove and a refrigerator. I cook oatmeal for breakfast, usually as sandwich of some type for lunch (many days we are out at a site during the day and lunch is skipped) and dinner is usually some kind of rice dish. Tonight I sweated some onion, hot peppers and okra. Added curry, then tomoto paste, water, sugar and cinnamon. Then mixed it with rice that was almost cooked. Last night it was simpler. Just a can of sardines in tomato sauce mixed with some rice, onions and peppers. I had cut up some onion, peppers and okra and blanched them and put them in the freezer. I will use them for about a week. I used the water from blanching for the rice. It was quite a spicy meal.

Friday the CEO of the LCCN Health Services Board and I went out to Demsa to see the progress on the two projects I am involved with at Demsa. Yakubu Bulama, who is my main contact was out at Waka with the Community Based Primary Health Care Program staff working on familiarizing the villages in the expansion area to the program.

The Lutheran Partners in Global Ministry and Minneapolis Area Synod project for the renovation of the Demsa Health Center had stalled last month when the local Chief decided that he wanted to use the transformer he had donated to the project at another site. The transformer was far larger than what was needed. The transformer he replaced it with was the wrong high tension voltage. The Health Board had to go and buy a new transformer that was properly sized and matched the local high tension line voltage. The smaller transformer was able to be mounted on the poles that have brought the high tension lines to the generator building. This  has blown a large hole in the budget at the end of the project. But we are back on track. The electrical can now be connected and In-Patient building tested and occupied.

The second project at Demsa is Global Health Ministries project funded by the 25-40 Foundation and other donors to build a training center that is designed for training water pump repair technicians and is also a general purpose training center. It will start with two buildings. One will be a training hall with a storage room for pumps, pipes and tools used in water pump repair training, a general storage room/office and two toilet rooms. The other building will be the student hostel with two dormitory style sleeping rooms each with two bathrooms. Due to the size of the area served by the water and health programs most classes will require overnight accommodations. The hostel building is currently having its foundations constructed the training building has the trenches for the the foundation dug. The builder found a problem with the architect's drawings for the training hall. It will have high ceilings as the training will include handling 10 foot long pipes. The contractor wants to install additional concrete columns in the walls to better support the taller walls. Early designs of the building had the columns. As the building was redesigned the columns were left out in the final drawings and I missed it.
 Hostel foundation construction. In-Patient Department in background center. Generator house in background on the left. This is a slightly different location than was discussed in December but it farther from the Generator building and farther away from the medical operations. Both are good for operations of a hostel.

Emmanuel Sabiya, CEO of LCCN Health Services Board and Dr. Stanley discussing the construction by the trenches for the training hall foundation. It is lined up with the In-Patient Department and the Outpatient Department with the covered walkway connect can be seen on the right. The blue pipe is a training borehole. We will be able to mount a pump in the classroom and show the students how to assemble and disassemble a pump in a classroom setting. The can then go outside and work on some other training boreholes. We will have three outside training boreholes that each will have different types of pumps on them.

This panorama shows the relative locations of the buildings. This is a 180 degree view so the dimensions are warped. The Out-Patient Department is hidden behind the In-Patient Department in this view.

One new building has been added. A small store where you can buy snacks and some provisions had been built. They have a kerosene burner to heat up soup. They sell to the patients, staff and construction workers.

We now have 2G internet connection at Demsa. It is slow but it works. In Jimeta I have 3G which is fast enough for most emails and doing my blog.

Monday we will get the change order processed so the columns can be added to the training hall and the foundations for the columns dug and they can start building.