Photos from Singapore, part 2

More views from our hotel window.









Orchard Road shopping district, dressed for Christmas!









In Little India.







In the city.

Singapore photos

I'm taking some time to get some blog entries in today. Notice that I've done two others.

Here are a few photos from our trip.
View from window of Singapore Hotel. Yummy!

Technical difficults are not allowing me to add more. I'll post this and add more later.

Random bits of info

In the offices, there have been some construction workers doing renovation work. The first few times I walked in to my office, I was surprised at their surprise to see me. Now, they're used to me. But this morning I finally realized why they were surprised. I must be a bit dense but I realized that I am now the only non-Nigerian woman working in these office buildings. Jim's company has other offices in other locations in the area and there's, well, let's see -- an Indian woman working in one of the buildings. That's it, there. At another location there are a few white gals -- I can count four out of a few hundred employees.

Because there are a few wives still on the camp, I don't feel alone. But in the offices, well, it is a bit weird!!! There never were many of us -- three in all, I guess, now that I think of it ...

We're onto the 9th week without rain. But for the past three days I can feel a bit of humidity returning in air. Lucy says that soon the rains will come. We need it VERY badly but, quite selfishly, I would love it if the rain came in small doses ...

There's a fuel (pronounced "fool") shortage here at the moment. Evidently the government creates this situation every December and January -- driving prices up as the demand is higher during the holidays when people travel back to their villages. So, empty cars line the streets and as you follow the line for a few minutes you'll find that it usually leads to a Fuel Station. Folks can spend the entire day in line and still not get any fuel. Supposedly, it will get better soon ...

That causes other prices to increase. Our "fish lady" brought us a fish that I expected to pay N3000 for and her price was N4500. That's around $40 for a fish the size of a typcial silver salmon. I can get a fillet of beef from out of the country for a better price than that. She said that the fish prices are up and the transportation for public transit is up.

Public transit, by the way, means packing about 25 people into a minivan designed to hold 8. Their belongings are on the roof, strapped on in piles that sometimes double the height of the "bus." Hanging out the back are the smaller things -- baskets of chickens (live), luggage, products they are taking to the market, construction materials like rebar or other metal posts, ... For a short drive it costs them N200 plus extra for their belongings.

Poverty in Wealth

This is an excerpt from an article that's in the Feb. 2007 Vanity Fair issue called Blood Oil. I just read the full article on line. Very interesting! From what I know, most of it is accurate. He has a couple of details a bit off, but not much. The guy he refers to as being shot while in traffic - yes, that happened but it wasn't political. It was because he had made some poor personal choices relating to someone else's wife. No expat has been shot due to the political situation.

Excerpt:

As is often the case in Africa, many of Nigeria's problems come as much from wealth as from poverty. African countries that happen to have valuable resources—oil in Angola and Nigeria, diamonds in Congo and Sierra Leone—are among the poorest and most violent on the continent. Economists refer to this phenomenon as the "resource curse." The resource curse holds that underdeveloped countries with great natural wealth fail to diversify their industry or to invest in education, which leads to long-term economic decline. The per capita gross national product of OPEC countries, for example, has been in steady decline for the past 30 years, whereas the per capita G.N.P. of non-oil-producing countries in the developing world has steadily risen.

According to the World Bank, most of Nigeria's oil wealth gets siphoned off by 1 percent of the population, condemning more than half of the country to subsist on less than a dollar a day. By that standard, it is one of the poorest countries in the world. Since independence in 1960, it is estimated that between $300 and $400 billion of oil revenue has been stolen or misspent by corrupt government officials—an amount of money approaching all the Western aid received by Africa in those years. Former president Sani Abacha and his inner circle stole at least $2 billion. In a recent crackdown on corruption, the president of the Nigerian senate had to resign after accusations that he had solicited a bribe in exchange for pushing through an inflated education budget (which presumably would then have been plundered by others). A former inspector general of the national police, after being accused of stealing between $52 and $140 million, was recently sentenced to six months in prison for a lesser charge. And two Nigerian admirals were put on trial for trying to sell stolen oil to an international crime syndicate.

The list of wrongdoing continues almost without end. With top government officials so brazenly violating the social contract, everyone downstream inevitably follows suit. The Nigerian constitution stipulates that just under 50 percent of national oil revenue must be distributed to state and local governments, and that an additional 13 percent must go to the nine oil-producing states of the Niger delta. Last year that amounted to almost $6 billion for the nine delta states—plenty, it would seem, to take care of basic social services. The problem, however, is that the money goes to the governors' offices and then simply disappears. A financial-crimes commission was recently formed to investigate all of the country's 36 governors, and it wound up accusing all but 5 of corruption. The most apparently egregious case was that of Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, who was accused of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars while he was governor of Bayelsa State. He fled to England, was arrested for money-laundering, jumped bail, and slipped back into Nigeria dressed as a woman. (The English authorities had taken his passport.) When asked how he managed to make the trip, he said he had no idea. "All the glory goes to God," he explained. He is now in custody awaiting trial.

"It's going to be tough," human-rights activist Oronto Douglas said when I asked him about reforming Nigerian politics. "Nobody who has privilege surrenders it easily. The struggle is to get people to give up power who got it illegally."

Back in Nigeria, Again

Well, we're back and it's feeling a bit weird.

Firstly, due to an incident involving a bomb that was rather near our compound, our company decided to move all children out of this location. Wives without children had an option to stay with their hubbies. Therefore, many great people have returned to their home countries and the dads will just be visiting them once every two months. The cool thing is that the wives who are here really want to be here so the attitude on the camp is pretty terrific. Everyone has a "can do" kind of approach and is chipping in to make this experience a great one. We do have limited mobility so I'm coming up with ideas for entertainment on the camp. Some who had been miserable will not be back -- so, now no one here is made miserable by their misery!!! Hallelujah!!

We feel quite safe, still. Our company is very cautious and makes decisions based on the future projections. Things will be a bit shakey up to the elections in April and then beyond. We plan on being out of country during that time. If these elections succeed and a new president takes office it will be the first time in the history of this rather wackie nation that there has been a transfer of power from one civilian government to another without a military coup or a few coups. Most people expect the election to happen. There will, more than likely, be a president elected from the North. The main candidate appears to be a fairly honest dude -- quite an accomplishment in itself seeing the rampant nature of the corruption in this land.

Jim's swamped with work! But other than the occasional panick that accompanies too many demands at a time, he's thriving quite well. My work load has become reasonable due to the decrease in numbers of folks on our camps, the lack of children, etc.

I never had the access to internet that I had hoped so I'll be adding photos from our trip on this entry and for the next few.












I'll work our way backward, so I'll start with Sydney and back up to Singapore in later entries.

Happy New Year

Here's a shot of our late Christmas Eve dinner -- out on Joey's back porch!







Greetings from Sydney Harbour!
Here are a few snaps of the fireworks -- I needed a tripod, etc. -- so they're not too super-dooper but the show certainly was!!