I have been in Nigeria, to my surprise, for about a year. It was work, of course.
Not only were all the people black in color, but I had seen many unusual things.
I have carried millions of yen with me. You can never leave your bag around because you never know when it might be stolen. Even if you make a bank deposit, you will not get any interest. Rather, we pay to have them stored.
I would say that the population is about half Christian and half Muslim. There are more Muslims in the north, which is geographically closer to the Muslim areas, and more Christians in the south. The servant uncle, who was a Muslim, was “about 40 years old” and had four wives. His wives live and work in different places. When I asked him if they fought with each other, he said they did not. However, the rate of attendance was inevitably higher for the younger ones, so the oldest one came to complain from time to time.
At first I worried as soon as they bit me, because they said there were mosquitoes that carried malaria. However, I was not so worried anymore, as the only time I get sick is when I am bitten by a female during the egg-laying season. The locals are fine drinking water from the tap, but Japanese people have to boil it before drinking it or they soon get diarrhea.
When I asked them what kind of tree it was, they replied only that it was a tree. There are not many kinds of trees, so they don’t know what they are. It was the same with fish. The seasons, too, are not spring, summer, fall, and winter, but three: the dry season, the rainy season, and the hamataan season. The last one is the cloudy season when sand falls from the Sahara Desert. It would be the Japanese equivalent of yellow sand that sometimes comes from China.
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The rainy season brings tremendous squalls. One time, I had a contractor build a “eave” instead of a garage in preparation for the rainy season. I had the contractor install a plastic one with an uneven surface to guide the water. However, the contractor made the eaves flat. If they had raised the one closest to the house a little, the water would have fallen down smoothly, but because they made it flat, it stayed there. That was the level of their technology.
One time, I was asked this at the airport. “Are you the Korean I met yesterday?” “No, this is my first time today, I am Japanese. He said you Asians look alike to us. I said all black people look alike. But he said we
are very different each other.
I ask, “Who is that boy?” and they say, “Oh, that black guy”. Among them there seem to be blacks and whites. As I became more and more familiar with them, I realized that this is true. Japanese people are also called “white” or “black,” but the difference seems to be greater among them.
When I went to a certain beach, there were about 20 tin houses lined up in the vicinity. They seemed to be the homes of people who had come from the countryside in search of work. When I walked past the beach where everyone was swimming, I could smell the odor. In other words, the beach is their toilet.
There is a big difference between countries.
