8.17.2007

Blessing's Shop

For some clients who come into the Faith Alive Foundation for HIV testing and test positive, FAF runs a sewing school, a knitting school, a computer school and a wood shop to give them the skills they need to support themselves. If they show that they are serious about earning a living and working hard, their doctors and counselors can recommend them to these schools, where they can attend classes for free, and upon successful graduation, they are set up with the necessities for starting their own businesses.

Blessing is a tall, beautiful woman with a huge smile and gleaming skin. She greets everyone who comes into her shop with sparking eyes and an enthusiastic hug, and is one of the sweetest, most genuine people I have ever met. Blessing is one of the graduates of the sewing school, and now owns her own shop a short way down the road from the FAF clinic. She received a sewing machine from the school- a manually operated Butterfly- and now has eight students of her own, who all staff her shop. She and her students make gorgeous clothes, custom tailored. She took me and Dad to the market a few days ago (an adventure in and of itself) to pick out fabric for our outfits, then took our measurements and requests. Val and Jen, the two other volunteers here who arrived a couple of weeks before we did, already each have several stunning Nigerian outfits- vibrant colors and patterns, no two skirts or dresses alike. Although I can't imagine a setting in the states where I could comfortably get away with the whole getup, I still can't wait to see how ours turn out and hopefully get to wear one here before we go.

Today I spent the morning helping with one of the HIV/AIDS clinic teams, seeing patients and filling ARV regiment prescriptions, which was both amazing and intense- and also, frankly, stunning, for reasons I will elaborate on later. After lunch at home with the others, I stopped by Blessing's on my way back to the clinic to say hi. She gave me a huge hug and told me to come in and sit down. It was raining, and the longer I stayed and talked with the girls, the harder it came down, so I decided just to stay until the rain stopped. Friends dropped in and out, bunches of children played outside and shouted "oyiba!" (white girl), laughing, when they spotted me inside. I was admiring a purple embroidered scrap on the floor and Blessing told me I could have it to use as a headband. It was still raining hard. Then her friend Mary decided that I should have my hair braided, so she plunked a chair down in the middle of the shop and proceeded to comb out my hair and give me two very tight and impressively straight braids. Blessing offered me some of her lunch, traditional Nigerian ache- a spicy couscous and vegetable stew- and later gave me a packet of cookies. She teased me that soon she would teach me to sew, and when I told her I knew how, she laughed and asked if I wanted to sew something. She found me another scrap and I sat at the empty machine. It took me forever to get a simple hem down one side of the strip I was working with and I never did quite get the hang of the manual machine. Blessing and her girls make it seem so easy, but it was actually really challenging and so much harder than it looks. I couldn't get the pedal pumping fluidly enough to keep the needle going in a forward direction, so it kept going forward a few stiches and then back a few stiches, veering off the fold. They laughed and laughed at me. Now I have even more respect and appreciation for the things they make, working quickly and expertly over complicated seams and zippers. A couple of people walked in and laughed to see me behind the machine. Blessing and Mary asked if I had a boyfriend and told me they could get a lineup of Nigerians to marry me if I was interested. Eventually it stopped raining, but I was having too much fun to leave, and before I knew it, it was 4:30. At one point the people hanging out in the shop pointed down the street and told me that there was another white person coming. A couple of minutes later, a Chinese girl walked in to pick up some dresses and have them fitted. She is actually French, in Jos for two months to work on a project at the university. Here, any non-black person is considered "white". Soon Jen, who is Indian, joined us on her way home from the clinic, and everyone kidded us about how the men would be stopping by to talk to the three white girls. They taught me some phrases in pidgin English, which is among the more than 250 languages spoken in Nigeria (pidgin English is just as indicipherable to me as any of the others).

I have loved getting to know some people here in just the short time we have been in Jos. Along with the work we are getting to witness and help with, this has made all the difference between Nigeria and Namibia for me. I feel like I am actually in Africa, and not just some American, closed-off compound in a city. I am getting the incredible opportunity to see and do things that are meaningful to me and vitally important to the community. Maybe this is an unfair generalization, but the people here seem so much friendlier and more open and outgoing than the people I met in Namibia- maybe this is a coincidence, maybe not. Maybe part of the difference has to do with the fact that I know I am only here for 16 days- so things like no running water, repetetive heavy meals, limited mobility, and missing family and friends have not bothered me, as opposed to living in a foreign place for months at a time. Whatever the difference, it has been huge.

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