They want to eat my dog!

Poor old Toby dog was unable to put his weight on one of his front legs this morning. As there was no obvious cause I decided to take him on the 40 minute, pothole laden journey to Howard the Australian vet.  

All went smoothly (apart from some alarming clanking as I drove over drastic speed bumps) and Howard diagnosed a probable sprained ligament. Rest and time were prescribed and we set off home. 

A short way down the road stood an armed man near a truck belonging to the "safety on the highways" branch of Nigerian security. Several ideas about how to improve safety on the highways sprang to mind: fill in the road craters, remove lunatic drivers and unsafe vehicles, don't have armed men standing in the middle of the road but I decided to keep my suggestions to myself. He asked to see my particulars and directed me to the side of the road where his two colleagues waited with their automatic rifles.

"Where is my happy new year?" asked the first, code for give me some money but we don't mention that. I wished him a happy new year and the ability to do his job with honesty and integrity. Then he spotted Toby. "You should give me your dog." (Some tribes on the Plateau see dogmeat as a delicacy.)
"You're not going to eat my dog," I replied.
"God wants us to give things," he answered.
"Not our dogs to be eaten."

We went good humouredly back and forth on the same subject for a while before he waved me on. I wasn't a lucrative target and other cars were passing by so Toby escaped becoming dinner. And people wonder why sometimes we just don't want to leave the compound.

Dinner?

Shopping

I've just come back from a brief trip to the shops in Bukuru.

One shop which advertises electronic payment facilities didn't have a working machine nor did it have change for cash but as usual tried to pay me off in individually wrapped sweets.
Insistent cries of "Baturia" or "Oyibo" weren't friendly greetings but invitations to be ripped off. If I hadn't carefully checked the tomatoes half would have been rotten, as it is I haven't yet had the heart to look at how many bad ones got through the net.
The happy young man at the meat stall carefully showed me his scales as he weighed 500g meat after resetting them when I queried their accuracy. Somehow my kitchen scales show only 350g. I wonder whose are the more reliable.

The sad thing is that I expect to be cheated or overcharged every time I have to go to the market. It doesn't make it easier to be proved right and every time this happens another little piece is chipped from the reputation of the majority of Nigerians. Pray for this country, that 2016 will bring the start of a complete change of heart and attitudes at all level of society - lack of integrity is certainly not confined to the market.