Post date: Aug 8, 2014 2:36:24 PM
This post consists of my [scanned and re-typed] notes from traveling while in the Peace Corps in Nigeria 1963-65. I traveled a lot - covering 17,000 miles in 18 months while teaching. [My class schedule allowed me to leave mid-day Friday and resume teaching after lunch on Monday.]
Ah! These hotels! This one has only two rooms for guests at $1.75 per night, but you get clean sheets. It also has four or five rooms for the girls, and the attendant girls, who may parade in a wrapper [the most common form of dress - a piece of cloth wrapped around the body and tucked in at the top like a bath towel] or primp in their rooms attired in bra and skirt. It also has a top floor dance hall and bar, plus bar downstairs with a very loud phonograph.
Here the word "hotel" means a place to eat, so one of the rooms has a fire in the corner with a pot or two of stew and some rice, plus another room with a large table and some chairs, a basin to wash your hand, and salt. I think the main income is rent from the girls, who eagerly press every bar customer for additional business.
The "bathroom" is a shower used as a urinal by the guests and dance customers, and a toilet, used as a storeroom and so always locked. These hotels are not designed for sleeping, so a beer or two must always be added to the price of the room.
Also there is a portion marked off for the family of the manager, which usually includes all or most of the employees. His mother, sisters (who may work in other rooms) and junior brothers (whom he puts through primary school) sleep there. A family household living unit is all the people who eat from the same pot. In some areas of Port Harcourt (Dioba neighborhood) it is common for 16 families to cook in one communal kitchen, in one compound. Often the household has 3-6 persons and lives in one or two rooms. Dioba is the slum of P.H. The rent per household is ten shillings to one Pound a month. Streets in Diobu are vary bad. Often the roof leaks.