Abuja, Nigeria

My flight from Tulsa to Abuja was uneventful for the most part. I had to run a 5K from one gate to the next in Minneapolis to make my connection. I'm sure the gates were in two different counties, but I made it.....barely!! I met up with Augustin in Amsterdam as well as our client's CFO. We arrived to Abuja on Saturday night around 9pm by the time we went through customs. It's amazing how different this is from Jakarta. It's much more relaxed and there weren't numerous drivers trying to lure us to their cab. The first thing I noticed was that there are very few motorcycles. In fact there are very few street lights. It's very dark here at night.

Today I went to Catholic church with some of the people from our organization. Many of the women were dressed in their colorful traditional outfits....gorgeous!! Nigeria is about 50/50 Muslim/Christians. We had a quick tour around the city with our driver and then went on a walking tour in the area close to the hotel. There are alot of little gecko lizards running all over and many poor undeveloped or partially developed areas.

The driver took us to exchange USD for the local currency. It was very strange. I pictured going to an official currency exchange facility, but it was nothing like that. Instead, our driver knew right where to go and it was to some of the guys just hanging out in the street in a certain area. I would have never guessed they were the official money exchange agents. We pulled up and he started to negotiate exchange rates. He didn't like their rate, so we went to another group of men congregated in a certain area. Our driver explained there is a large amount of corruption here and you should not use an ATM at all. It seems to be quite a bit more expensive here compared to Jakarta.

Tomorrow we will be in the local office. Time to go to bed as we will have a very busy Monday.