Farewell

I am currently sitting in the Delta lounge at the Lagos airport preparing to depart for the last time… Destination: Austin. I could not be more excited to get home. It’s been a long six months over here in Nigeria, but I can wholeheartedly say it’s been an incredibly unforgettable experience. I have been constantly challenged, tested, and frustrated, even some of the time in a positive way. I’ve met some amazing people, made some great friends, and hope to keep in touch with many of them. I came here six months ago with pretty much no expectations. I had never lived outside the country before, let alone spent ANY time in a developing country. I half expected to sit alone at my house most the time and just read books and watch movies, which was certainly not the case. Looking back, I think my social life was likely more active than it’s ever been in my entire life, save maybe a year or two of college. I’ve never had so many weeknight activities and events while also filling most my weekends quite easily. It far surpassed the minimal expectations I had for this place.

That being said, nothing can compare to the excitement I have to come home right now. After being away from Texas for the last year and a half (CA for a year and Nigeria for 6 months), the anticipation to return is certainly at its height. I can’t wait to make a home for myself in Houston and finally settle in somewhere for an extended period of time. I can’t wait to be closer to my friends and family and reunite with many people I’ve seen so sparingly over the last two years almost. I’ve gotten the question a lot in the last week or so, “What will you miss about Nigeria?” This is a hard one for me to answer. I don’t think there will ever be a time I’ll be sitting anywhere, especially back in Texas, when I’ll think to myself, man, I really wish I was back in Nigeria right now. It just hasn’t been that kind of experience. I will always look back on these 6 months as something I’m incredibly grateful for and as an amazing eye-opening experience. There are certainly moments I’ve cherished and things I’ve done that I’m truly thankful for, but this just isn’t a place you would necessarily ever choose over somewhere else in the world. There are things about California, both SF and LA that I truly miss; things I wish I could go back and do again or do more often. There aren’t necessarily things like that about Nigeria for me. Well, maybe with one exception – I really did enjoy the Fat Boy Run and would mark that as my favorite thing about this place. I could see myself sitting at home on some Friday night in the future wishing I was out doing that. But that’s the anomaly. The biggest thing, and largely the only thing, I’m sad to leave behind are many of the people here. I made some good friends and even enjoyed a few coworkers and sincerely hope our paths cross again in the future.

In conclusion, I’ve resolved that this will be my final blog post. The intention of this blog was to keep people informed on my travels and experiences abroad, while also serving as a journal of sorts for myself. This was never intended to be a long-term, permanent thing for me, so on my return to the states tomorrow I will say goodbye to Nigeria Nick once and for all. As good ol’ Tyrus Borck put it, it’s time to welcome back Texas Nick. I hope anyone that’s actually read and kept up with this has found it at least slightly entertaining and enlightening. It’s been somewhat of an annoyance for me at times to actually keep up with this, but I’m very pleased that I have. I can’t wait to look back on this years from now and remember this experience that was such an invaluable period of my life. For any of you reading this that I’m leaving behind, I’m sorry to go. But, for those of you reading this that I’m coming home to, I cannot wait for what is to come! Texas, I’m coming home.

P.S.  In what is a perfectly fitting departure, I just had to bribe airport security to let me through. This is the first time I’ve personally had to bribe someone here, though I’ve heard countless stories and witnessed it several times. I had a large ceramic mug that I purchased from Munich in my carry-on bag because I didn’t want to risk it getting damaged in my checked bag. Apparently it’s too big and can be used as a weapon (what?) so they tried forcing me to check my bag, which would have been another excess bag and cost me $200. Instead, I offered the guard 1000 Naira (equivalent to $6) and they let me go on through. Ohhh Nigeria… 

Motherless Babies Home

Two Thursdays ago I had the incredible opportunity to visit a local orphanage here in Lagos. A group goes from our camp every Thursday morning and that week my boss was gracious enough to grant me the morning off to take advantage of this opportunity. I had honestly resigned myself to the fact that I'd never get to go because they only went on weekdays, but after finally just talking to my boss about it she was perfectly willing, if not eager, to give me the morning off to experience this before I left Nigeria. For obvious reasons, they don't allow you to bring cameras or take pictures or anything, so I don't have any of those to share. But it was certainly another amazing experience that will stick with me forever.

I think this was actually the first time I'd ever visited an orphanage of any kind, so I didn't really know what to expect. The living conditions were certainly not great, but surprisingly better than I had anticipated. It was definitely better than many other housing and living situations I've seen elsewhere around Nigeria. There wasn't any air conditioning and it appeared most the kids slept 2-3 to a bed, but it seemed like they were still all pretty well fed and cared after. The Chevron group that goes every Thursday always brings a few big boxes of toys and balls to play with while we're there. It was very obvious that this is rare for them as the children were all beyond ecstatic to have toys and things to play with. It appeared they didn't have really any toys of their own, so these few hours were likely the highlight of their week. I asked one of the women why we didn't simply leave the toys there for them and the response I received was because they are just not cared for. The toys would get destroyed or stolen too easily and there had actually been instances in the past where they saw some of the employees stealing toys to take home for their own families. So unfortunately they just couldn't trust to leave them there which is quite disappointing. 

We only stayed for a couple hours, but I truly enjoyed my time spent there. We did spend a bit of time breaking up fights over toys and trying to ensure everyone got their turns, but that's pretty natural with kids anywhere it seems. I got to play ball with some of the older boys outside (soccer that is) and play around with some of the younger toddlers with their different toys inside. There was also one instance I had a young boy sitting on my lap and all he wanted to do was lay his head on my chest and be held. This was definitely the most heart-warming moment of the day. It occurred to me that these kids probably rarely ever get any kind of special one-on-one attention. The child-to-staff ratio was presumably around 20:1 and there are a good amount of infants/newborns who require most of the attention. I can only assume this leaves the toddlers and other young children lacking much attention. I can't blame them for just wanting to be held. My heart really went out to them. While it was certainly tough to see children living like this, abandoned and with no parents, it still brought joy to me to know that these kids have been given a chance. I'm sure there are plenty more kids around Africa living with virtually no parents that aren't getting at least the minimal attention and care these orphanage children are. And praise God that these kids were at least given a chance at life, unlike millions of others. 

Alright, changing topics real quick. I spent the last week out of the office doing a contractor audit with the same Nigerian coworker I'd done all that travel with recently. We were auditing a former contractor who operated all our airline shuttle services around Nigeria until just this past December. We essentially combed through all the contractual documents that outlined the pricing structures and amended agreements then went through all the invoices from the past two years making sure all the billing and payments were done appropriately and in line with the contract terms. It was actually really interesting and possibly my favorite thing I've gotten to do here work-wise. We had some good findings and were actually able to pick up some lost money along the way. The crappy part was that the contractor's office is way out by the airport, which is about an hour and a half away from the Chevron camp. So, basically I was driving an hour and a half each way in the morning and afternoon every day this past week to get out there for this audit. I don't think I'll ever get used to Lagos traffic, but at least I had a good book to read and got a lot of reading in. 

Well, as I sit here writing this and looking ahead to the next few weeks, I'm starting to realize this may already be one of my last posts. One week from today I'll be leaving for South Africa to meet my parents in Cape Town for a two week vacation and safari. I return to Lagos on March 9, and have recently found out I may have a pretty quick turnaround heading back to the states just a few days later. It's looking like there's a good chance I'll be home by the weekend of March 15th, which means this week ahead may be my last full week of work in Nigeria. In any case, I'll certainly put up one final farewell post, but not sure if I'll get any more in between now and then; I'll try though. I have recently received and signed my official offer letter to return to the Houston office starting April 1st and couldn't be more excited about returning home to the greatest state there is. I am thrilled to see my parents next week for the first time in 5 months and almost equally excited to return home and see everyone else. It's been too long. I'm not sure if anyone still even reads this blog besides me and my parents anymore, but regardless, see ya soon 'Merica!

Business Travels: Week 2

Well, I just returned from my second week of traveling around Nigeria on business and never thought it would feel so good to be back. This week wasn't quite as eventful as the last - very straightforward as far as the work went - although there were still some hiccups in travel, as expected. This week's travel consisted of Abuja and Port Harcourt. Our flight Monday morning got out just fine, as it was the first of the day and, therefore, didn't have much opportunity for delay. Our flight Wednesday morning was delayed about an hour, which is pretty good, all things considered. The only frustrating part about this was that we literally never got an update on the flight status. Our boarding time came and went, as well as our departure time, without hearing a thing. They finally just called us to board about an hour late. Wednesday, however, was unique in that the main Chevron locations in Nigeria all went on strike. There has been an ongoing dispute the last couple weeks and the union officials finally decided they wanted to protest (the whole matter was pretty ridiculous if you ask me). Anyways, this kept us from working in our designated location at all Wednesday and we had to wait until they called off the strike Thursday morning before we could go in and get our work done. Luckily, the workload was pretty light at this last location, so we didn't require much time to finish everything up and were actually able to catch a flight back to Lagos Thursday afternoon, a day earlier than expected. But of course, we weren't going to get out that easy... our 3:30 PM flight got delayed initially until 5:00, but we didn't end up leaving until closer to 6:00. And this was after arriving at the airport plenty early at about 1:15, so we had a nice long afternoon at the airport bar, which actually wasn't too bad; we were both expecting delays anyway. After another nice long and slow drive back from the Lagos airport, I eventually made it home around 10:00, so not all that bad. Just continuing to build that patience...

So, in conclusion, after two weeks of traveling around Nigeria, I'm happy to say I successfully made it to four of our different locations and have returned home safely (which I know the latter is what my mother is most thrilled about). This was absolutely a great opportunity in that I got to see and experience things I had never before, including some rather remote areas of the country. The hotels and guest houses were actually pretty nice and the helicopter rides were, of course, a highlight. Getting around Nigeria was certainly not an easy task though, and I have plenty more small stories I'd be happy to share with anyone. 'Twas a great experience and truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but one I must say I'm okay to not be doing again in the near future.

Lastly, here are a couple pictures I promised from our platform visit last week. They actually published these pictures on the Chevron Nigeria website along with an article about our visit out there (not in any way because I was there, but because the GM of Operations was our escort and he presented some awards to the employees onsite there).

Business Travels

So this past week I've had the opportunity to do my first business travel with Chevron Nigeria, or with Chevron at all for that matter. I returned to the Lekki camp last night for the weekend, and will depart again Monday morning for another week of traveling. I'm traveling with a Nigerian coworker of mine from the Internal Controls group and we're visiting four of our different operating locations all around Nigeria conducting reviews at each place. Essentially, we are doing cash counts at each location, making sure their imprest accounts (petty cash) match whatever is on the books. Along with this, we're analyzing their usage of the funds over the last year and trying to find ways to eliminate the use of cash across the entire business. The goal is basically to use cash for nothing except actual emergency situations. The reviews went smoothly this week, and hopefully will next week as well. Honestly, the whole thing is pretty straightforward, so it's hard to imagine what could actually go wrong.

As far as the travel itself, one thing was reiterated to me again this week: domestic travel in Nigeria stinks. I mean, really stinks. I mentioned this in a post awhile back when I traveled for a weekend trip to Calabar, but the operation of the airlines here really leaves you scratching your head. More on this in a bit, but first I'll talk about the good parts of the trip. Chevron sponsored travel, on the other hand, is quite the opposite - it's pretty nice. The first leg of my trip Monday morning, my coworker and I got to travel on a private float plane that Chevron utilizes for shuttling people to and from the other main work location, Escravos. See the pictures below.

On our second day in Escravos, we set up a trip with the GM of Operations out there to take us offshore to one of the platforms. This was a really neat experience. We got to travel by helicopter (my first time) out to one of our platforms that essentially separates and funnels oil and gas brought up from 7 different wells back to our onshore terminal. It was such an incredible site to see the breadth of our offshore operations from an aerial view. I was told that in the multiple fields we operate offshore in this area we have about 300 individual platforms, some of which are actual wells, some serve as storage, some for offloading and shipping, and others for transporting, to name a few. I can't express enough how incredible it was to see the expansiveness of this from above, as well as from the single platform we landed on and toured. They did take some pictures of us while we were out there, complete with the hard hats, goggles, gloves, and steel-toed boots, of which I have not yet seen. If they ever get sent to me I'll be sure to share them.

On Wednesday, we got to take another helicopter trip to our next location. It was only about a 20-minute trip at 1500 feet elevation. This entire area of Nigeria is dense swamps and forests, so, again, it was quite cool to see these parts from an aerial view. Unfortunately, no pictures since we had to turn our phones off, but I definitely stashed away some mental ones.

Okay, now to the last leg of the trip. Friday morning we were supposed to take a domestic flight back to Lagos at 9:55 AM. I never expected this flight to be on time, as that would be a lot to ask, but didn't really expect a complete cancellation, which is, of course, what happened. They announced the cancellation about 30 minutes before departure and cited only "operational issues" as the reason. I didn't need any more reason than that because, alas, my response to everything now is simply TIA - this is Africa. Nothing really surprises me anymore except for, honestly, at risk of sounding arrogant, the level of patience I've acquired since being here. I think my reactions to these situations would have been totally different as little as six months ago. Anyways, after about a 45 minute scramble by our airport protocol personnel to try and get us re-booked, they finally put a plan together. We were to fly back to Escravos, via a small shuttle plane, and catch the only flight from Escravos back to Lagos at 4 PM. Both of these flights were only for Chevron employees as we have such a high volume of people shuttling between these locations, we contract a number of these flights just for us. I felt a little guilty because they bumped a few people off both of these flights for us solely because we are expats and they give us priority. They do it this way because Chevron sees it as a safety concern; they see it as more risky to leave the expats stranded in the remote locations than the nationals, which kind of makes sense. I felt a little bad at first, but it soon wore off as I just really wanted to get home. Whoops.

So what should have been a relatively quick trip - plane landing by 11 AM and home by 12:30ish - ended up being a full 12 hour travel day, getting me home around 7:30 PM. There were many other little nuances that occurred throughout the day to make it more entertaining (frustrating), but I won't go into detail on those. Traveling the airlines here is never a smooth process and you can never know what to expect. Wish me luck, because every leg of our journey next week is via domestic airlines - three in total. Who knows if we're even going to get any work done; we might just spend three whole days sitting in airports. I'm sure I'll be back in a week with some good updates. Until next time...

A Day at the Beach

Certainly not the most spectacular, eye-opening, or even memorable experience I've had in Africa, but I think this past Sunday would rank as the most fun. About 20 of us from camp piled into SUVs Sunday morning and made roughly an hour drive out to a nearby beach. One of the veterans of camp, who's lived here about 9 years now and knows the protocol, reserved us a private beach hut, arranged for the security escorts and accounted for all the minutia that accompanies doing an event like this (everything is just more complicated here). Apparently several years ago many of the beach huts out there were all owned by Chevron people and on any given weekend you could go out there and see flocks of Chevron expats spending their weekends at the beach. But, in the recent years it has gotten more difficult to get out there due to heavier traffic, stricter security restrictions, and also a decreasing number of expats living on camp.

As I've said before, it's just always nice when you get an opportunity to get off of the camp and this was definitely no exception. It felt so great to just get out by the water, play some ladder golf, toss a football, go for a swim, cook out, and forget where you are for a little bit. That being said, it was also insanely hot and I couldn't stop sweating the entire day, but hey, it's Africa... what can you expect? Here's a few pictures of our hut and view of the water. You'll notice that, of course, as soon as they spot the Oweebos (white people) they all come rushing over trying to sell us stuff. You can see table cloths, aprons, and paintings all draped over our fence.

And then there was this, which was probably the most impressive display of head-balancing I've seen so far in Africa (and you see it everywhere). These guys would literally throw dozens of baskets on top of one another and pack them up as tight as they could, carefully lift them on top of their heads while sitting down, and then stand up and walk around. Quite impressive!

Made some pretty bomb kebabs and sausages as well. Some of the best food I've eaten over here.

And then on the way home came the grand finale, because no African adventure is complete without a little excitement... On the trip back, about 5 minutes into the drive, the lead car in the caravan started smoking from the front of the vehicle. After pulling into a gas station and checking out the problem, one of the guys realized they had kept on the 4WD and that was causing the issue once we got onto the main road and out of the sand. Thinking the problem was fixed, we continued on our merry way. Then, about 15 minutes later we started to see smoke coming from the car again, but not quite as thick this time. We decided to just continue on and hopefully make it home before it got any worse, as we were only about 10-15 minutes away at this point. Suddenly, about five minutes later, we saw a really thick plume of smoke start coming from the engine of the car and we quickly pulled off to the side of the road again. As we pulled up behind them, we noticed a flame on the underside of the car. The people in the vehicle couldn't see, so we naturally started screaming at them to get out, while the driver of our car rushed into the trunk, grabbed a fire extinguisher, and sprinted over the vehicle. He crawled underneath and put out the flame while everyone else was running away from the car. Basically, our driver saved the day. Needless to say, that car was no longer driveable, so we all squished into the remaining cars and had to get a tow truck to come pick up the other one. Everyone made it home safely, but it sure added a little excitement to the trip. Here are a few pictures: one right after the fire was put out and everyone's walking away in the smoke, and a couple others of us just chillin on the side of the road trying to figure out what to do.

A Few Interesting Facts on Nigeria's Oil Economy

In reading a news article this morning I came across some facts about the oil and gas industry in Nigeria I thought worth sharing. It's just a few simple facts that demonstrate the developing economy of this region, but how it's sadly crippled by sheer corruption of both government and individuals.

• In the past decade, Africa's economy has grown by an average of 5.6% a year, compared with the world-wide growth rate of 3.6% per year, according to the IMF.
• The International Energy Agency expects oil consumption in Africa to surge about 30% to 4.5 million barrels a day by 2018. This jump represents 15% of the world's projected rise in oil demand and makes Africa the world's fastest-growing oil user.
• The are currently four government-run refineries in Lagos, Nigeria, that operate at barely 20% capacity. (This leads to the export of nearly all Nigerian crude production and forces them to import the necessary finished products of gasoline, diesel, etc., removing vital jobs from the economy).
• As much as 400,000 barrels of oil per day -- or one-sixth of total output -- are pilfered from pipelines by bandits. Most of the stolen crude is loaded onto barges at night and shipped abroad.
• Nigeria's government has collected about $1.3 trillion in oil revenue since 1980, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit. Yet about 60% of the country's 170 million people live on less than $1 a day, according to the government.

To me, this last fact is the one I find the most staggering, largely because it is visible everywhere you go. This figure illustrates the obvious misuse of government revenues gained from oil companies - clearly it's not going back to the citizens. The income gap in Nigeria is absolutely astonishing - you're either insanely rich or incredibly poor; there seems to be no middle class. 

There are many more facts out there that could give better evidence and provide a more complete story, but these are just some I quickly fished out of this one news article that I thought seemed basic, and yet telling enough. 

Merry Christmas from Nigeria!

Even though I'm not actually in Nigeria presently, I still think it's appropriate to share this picture today that some friends and I put together last week. Though I was very reluctant at first to take part in this, I must say I'm quite happy with the results haha. The resolution might not be too great on here though. I wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and pray that everyone is enjoying friends and family during these holidays. And if you are not able to be with friends or family, I pray that you are still finding peace and joy in the spirit of Christmas. God bless!